Spaceport Sweden, a company founded in 2007, has an idea to build a launching pad at Kiruna (small arctic town) airport for establishing commercial flight to space. Kiruna’s location in the far north of Sweden, and Europe, makes it a prime location for space flights. The idea is that space tourists would take off for a maximum two-hour trip into space aboard futuristic spacecraft currently undergoing testing, which resemble a cross between an airplane and a space shuttle and which can carry between one and six passengers.
Spaceport Sweden will be the first to offer space flights from Scandinavia
Spaceport Sweden said that passengers will be delighted at 100 kilometres above Earth and they allow them to experience five minutes of weightlessness. They have knowledge to create a unique adventure with global impact. The Swedes don’t have its own spacecraft, but for now they will not discover a partner, but it could get wind of that is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is very interested in cooperation.
The company is currently carrying out test flights in the United States and first commercial space flights are expected to take place in the United States in 2014 and a few years after that in Sweden.
Space flights could take off four times a day for passengers and researchers who want to test their experiments in microgravity. In the United States, more than 1000 tickets for space flights have already been reserved, at around $200,000 a piece.
If you can’t wait to visit space, Spaceport Sweden already offers flights from Kiruna airport to view the northern lights, a spectacular phenomenon of colourful lights that streak across the night sky, for the tidy sum of 6990 kronor ($1,059).
Sweden’s small Arctic town of Kiruna has a surprisingly international airport with regular flights to London and Tokyo, but it has even bigger plans: to offer commercial space flights
