The municipality in northern Sweden is aiming to become the world’s leading centre for space tourism in the future.
Europe’s first space centre to launch satellites and, in the future, perhaps tourists into space, will be inaugurated today, Friday, in Kiiruna, Sweden.
The Space Centre is located about 140 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. Its development began in 2005 with the aim of building a world-class centre for future space tourism.
In 2007, Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company, and Spaceport Sweden, the parent company of the Kiiruna centre, signed an agreement to work together to build a new launch centre.
Large-scale space tourism is just beginning
In addition to tourism, the now inaugurated space center is to serve as a launching and operating point for many space-related services, Spaceport Sweden informs on its website.
It is not known when the first spaceship or satellite is going to be launched from Kiruna.
The development of space tourism has been slow. Despite the advances in technology, flying anything into space is still relatively expensive.
Currently, trips outside the atmosphere are being developed by companies such as Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX, but ticket prices are calculated in hundreds of thousands or millions of euros, depending on the flight.