Sweden draws in tourists with its picturesque but frigid Arctic winters, its culture, and its pop culture claim to fame as the site of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But there might be an even bigger tourist draw in the small, northern-most Swedish town of Kiruna in the not-too-distant future: commercial space flight.
Spaceport Sweden, which plans on regularly sending travelers to near space, was founded in 2007. Currently offering space-related activities like flights from Kiruna airport to view the northern lights, the company is planning to expand and add suborbital space flights to its roster both for space tourists and researchers.
For the tourists, the suborbital flights would be two hours long, peaking at about 60 miles above the ground. As a reference, the International Space Station orbits at about 200 miles, and NASA has awarded astronaut wings to pilots who have flown over 50 miles. Between the excess Gs felt during the ascent and descent, passengers would experience just about five minutes of weightlessness midway through their flight. And they wouldn’t get a solitary experience, either. Flights would leave up to four times a day taking groups of two to six passengers in a futuristic spacecraft – currently undergoing testing – that’s half airplane and half space shuttle.
Interestingly, Spaceport Sweden’s director Karin Nilsdotter says Kiruna's northern location makes it a prime launch site. This goes against conventional launch wisdom that says equatorial sites are most conducive to easy launches; these sites use the Earth’s rotation to give spacecraft a good boost into orbit. That’s one of the factors that led NASA to pick Cape Canaveral as its launch site.
But there are some advantages to the northern site. Launches from the Arctic wouldn’t be disturbed by heavy air traffic. It’s not a densely populated area, which will make launching safer and less invasive for those living nearby. There’s also a lot of wide open spaces that far north, which cuts down on the bureaucratic details Sweden would have to work out with neighboring countries.
Geographical convenience aside, Kiruna is a staple in the Swedish space game, giving this commercial venture another reason to succeed. The city has 60 years experience in space research under its belt. The Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) was founded there in 1957, and the country’s research and rocket center, Esrange, was founded in 1966. Both institutes will work on the nascent spaceflight system but Esrange will play more of a consultant’s role; the company’s president declined to take a more central role in the commercial game since it’s not in the business of creating adventure.
From a business standpoint it’s looking like the program will pay off, even if the company can’t give real numbers yet. Spaceport Sweden is projecting it will send about 14,000 passengers on suborbital rides in its first ten years of business. That’s as specific as the company will be at the moment since details of the spacecraft aren’t public.
Spaceport Sweden isn’t building its own spacecraft, it’s collaborating with an unnamed company that’s doing the actual construction. Without revealing details, Spaceport Sweden has said that testing is underway in the United States.
And speaking of suborbital spaceflight in the United States, there are a number of American companies working towards the same goal, notably Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk's SpaceX. In America, more than 1,000 tickets for suborbital spaceflights with Virgin Galactic have already been reserved at around $200,000 each. And if Branson gets his way we might see these ticket holders fly as early as 2014. Sweden’s commercial spaceflight market likely won’t come to maturity that quickly.
In the mean time, people can keeping visiting Sweden’s frozen landscapes to look at the aurora. In all honesty, this cheaper space-esque vacation sounds pretty appealing.