Spaceport Sweden is a company that plans to make

Kiruna (; ; ; ) is the northernmost Stad (Sweden), city in Sweden, situated in the province of Lapland, Sweden, Lapland. It had 17,002 inhabitants in 2016 and is the seat of Kiruna Municipality (population: 23,167 in 2016) in Norrbotten County. The c ...

the primary European

Spaceport A spaceport or cosmodrome is a site for launching or receiving spacecraft, by analogy to a seaport for ships or an airport for aircraft. The word ''spaceport''—and even more so ''cosmodrome''—has traditionally referred to sites capable of ...

for personal

suborbital spaceflight A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched. Hence, it will not complete one orbital revolution, will ...

for

space tourism Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and lunar space tourism. Tourists are motivated by the possibility of viewing Earth from space, ...

, research, education, and a hub for cross-industry innovation. Spaceport Sweden is built by the

Swedish Space Corporation The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), also registered as Svenska rymdaktiebolaget, is a Swedish space services company. SSC operations consist of launches of sounding rockets and stratospheric balloons, tests of future generation rocket engines a ...

. Located in Kiruna, in

Swedish Lapland Lapland, also known by its Swedish name Lappland, is a province in northernmost Sweden. It borders the Swedish provinces of Jämtland, Ångermanland, Västerbotten, and Norrbotten, as well as Norway and Finland. Nearly a quarter of Sweden's ...

, Spaceport Sweden is being developed at Kiruna Airport which will be a hybrid for air and space travel as well as for learning adventures, education and research. Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Communication

Maud Olofsson Maud Elisabeth Olofsson (born ''Olsson'', 9 August 1955) is a former Swedish politician who was the leader of the Swedish Centre Party from 2001 to 2011, Minister for Enterprise and Energy from 2006 to 2011 and Deputy Prime Minister of Swede ...

inaugurated the project as a national initiative in 2007. The current

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of the spaceport is Karin Nilsdotter.

History

The official

inauguration In government and politics, inauguration is the process of swearing a person into office and thus making that person the incumbent. Such an inauguration commonly occurs through a formal ceremony or special event, which may also include an inau ...

of the company was made on 26 January 2007 and the company started off by signing an agreement with

Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group conglomerate, which retains an 11.9% stake through Virgin Investments Limited. It is headquartered in California, and opera ...

. The agreement stated that the two would be working together towards an operational agreement whereby Spaceport Sweden would be the first spaceport outside the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

which Virgin Galactic could use for flight campaigns. On 3 April 2008, a press conference was held in Kiruna, and a number of astronauts in training were presented to the press, but details of an agreement, if any, were not released. In February 2012, Spaceport Sweden hoped to have operational flights of

SpaceShipTwo The Scaled Composites Model 339 SpaceShipTwo (SS2) was an air-launched suborbital spaceplane type designed for space tourism. It was manufactured by The Spaceship Company, a California-based company owned by Virgin Galactic. SpaceShipTwo was ...

by 2015. In 2012, Spaceport Sweden introduced an initiative aimed at offering educational adventures and spaceflight training, providing participants with the chance to delve deeper into the aurora borealis through northern lights flights in Kiruna. Additionally, in partnership with QinetiQ, they launched a two-day spaceflight preparation program that utilizes a long-arm centrifuge and hypobaric chamber to simulate conditions and prepare individuals for upcoming space missions. In 2013, Spaceport Sweden initiated a limited offering of weightless flight experiences, in collaboration with AirZeroG and Novespace in France, to

private Private or privates may refer to: Music * "In Private", by Dusty Springfield from the 1990 album ''Reputation'' * Private (band), a Denmark-based band * "Private" (Ryōko Hirosue song), from the 1999 album ''Private'', written and also recorded ...

individuals using a specially outfitted

Airbus A300 The Airbus A300 is Airbus' first production aircraft and the world's first Twinjet, twin-engine, double-aisle Wide-body aircraft, (wide-body) airliner. It was developed by ''Airbus Industrie GIE'', now merged into Airbus SE, and manufactured f ...

capable of simulating a short-duration

zero-gravity Weightlessness is the complete or near-complete absence of the sensation of weight, i.e., zero apparent weight. It is also termed zero g-force, or zero-g (named after the g-force) or, incorrectly, zero gravity. Weight is a measurement of the fo ...

environment. In 2015 Spaceport Sweden won a Kiruna Lapland Award for the efforts to establish

commercial spaceflight Private spaceflight is any spaceflight development that is not conducted by a government agency, such as NASA or ESA. During the early decades of the Space Age, the government space agencies of the Soviet Union and United States pioneere ...

, in

Notes

{{Spaceport

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

Kiruna Scaled Composites Virgin Galactic Swedish companies established in 2007

History

See also

Notes