Norway, for its part, joined the race to launch satellites from the European continent on Thursday, opening a rocket launch base on the island of Andøya above the Arctic Circle.
• Also read: Putin wants to have the first segment of the Russian space station in orbit by 2027
• Also read: Earth could be home to large parts of another planet
Eleven months after that of Esrange in neighboring Sweden, the “Andøya Spaceport,” presented by its partners as “the first operational spaceport in continental Europe,” was inaugurated by the future King of Norway, Prince Haakon.
Against the backdrop of cold weather with Russia denying the country access to its cosmodromes and launch vehicles, the site must help Europe strengthen its autonomy to transport small and medium satellites into orbit.
The launch base, which would later have several launch pads, was built on land belonging to the Norwegian state-owned company Andøya Space, which had previously been used to launch suborbital rockets for scientific experiments.
The first space rocket to be launched from this island near the idyllic Lofoten archipelago is expected to be the Spectrum, a two-stage spacecraft with a lifting capacity of up to one tonne, developed by German start-up Isar Aerospace.
The date of the first launch is not yet known, but Isar Aerospace says it aims to send a first launch vehicle to Andøya by the end of the year in order to be able to carry out a first test flight “as early as possible”.
“Over the last five years, we have built a rocket that will help solve the most critical bottleneck in the European space industry: sovereign and competitive access to space,” said Director General Daniel Metzler in a press release.
Thanks to its location in the Arctic, the Andøya base is ideal for launching small polar or sun-synchronous satellites into orbit, those that fly over any point on the planet at the same solar time, a useful feature for Earth observation and meteorology.
From the Portuguese Azores to the United Kingdom and Spanish Andalusia, there are numerous competing European projects, often aiming to be first.
In Britain, billionaire Richard Branson’s company Virgin Orbit, which sent a rocket into the air using a Boeing 747, launched its first launch earlier this year, but it failed. The company ceased operations.