Sweden’s Esrange pushes toward Europe’s orbital future (Full Transcript)

[00:00:02] Speaker 1: High above the Arctic Circle, in Lapland's remote wilderness, there's snow, ice and rockets. We've come to the far north of Sweden to witness a rocket launch, and this spaceport is a key player in Europe's unfolding space race. S-Range, the European sounding rocket launching range. More than 600 rockets have blasted off from the S-Range Space Centre since the 1960s, working with space agencies and research institutes from around the world.

[00:00:51] Speaker 2: We launch right now sounding rockets, so scientific rockets that fly sub-orbitally, which means that they leave Earth, go up in space, quite high actually, 250 kilometres, and then they come down. You can do experiments during weightlessness, you could use it as a pre-flight before you go to the space station, or even for longer flights into space. From a science perspective, the possibility to launch rockets is really, really important for both Sweden and of course Europe. Then in the future, we will start launching satellites.

[00:01:23] Speaker 1: S-Range sits close to the Norwegian and Finnish borders, beside a vast 5,500 square kilometre landing zone, which, except for the occasional reindeer, is largely uninhabited.

[00:01:36] Speaker 2: You can see the rocket launch area, which is in the background, and if you start walking that direction, the first road you'll actually hit is a road in Norway. It's plenty of room for us. Anything that we launch with a rocket falls down safely without anyone coming to harm.

[00:01:51] Speaker 1: Soon, this Mafia's rocket, built by a team of international scientists from the German Aerospace Centre, will zoom 260 kilometres above the Earth.

[00:02:03] Speaker 3: The total flight from launch to touchdown is about 15 to 20 minutes. That means there's an acceleration phase of about one minute, and then we are leaving the atmosphere. Our rocket will reach about six to seven minutes of microgravity, and that's why we do this.

[00:02:19] Speaker 1: It's loaded with equipment to carry out experiments in space.

[00:02:23] Speaker 3: This is one of the rocket segments. We insert small payloads, like the one I'm showing here. What we are using in this campaign is a newly developed rocket motor. It allows us to send even more experiments to space.

[00:02:36] Speaker 1: Many of the rockets jetting off from S-Range begin their life further south. Like these labs in Stockholm. Take this one. It will help study the northern lights.

[00:02:47] Speaker 4: The rocket behind us will go into an active aurora and deploy sensors to understand more of what is going on up there.

[00:02:56] Speaker 1: For many researchers, the goal of using sounding rockets is to experience microgravity, or weightlessness, which helps scientists understand how things really work down here on Earth.

[00:03:10] Speaker 4: You can say that gravity disturbs all of your measurements. We have a lot of life science experiments, so biology and medicine. We recently launched experiments that are investigating diabetes and cancer on the same flights. We had experiments that did fluid experiments or material science.

[00:03:32] Speaker 1: When it comes to larger orbital rockets that can also carry satellites, the U.S. has several launch facilities. There's also the Russian Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, while Europe's own launch site is far, far away in South America's French Guiana. Now several new spaceports from Scotland to Norway are racing to deliver the continent's first orbital launch, but there's still some way to go. And competing for pole position, S-Range is also constructing a new launch pad and readying for flights within two years.

[00:04:13] Speaker 2: To have the capacity within continental Europe to launch rockets that take satellites out into orbit, and that's strategically really, really important.

[00:04:24] Speaker 1: Fueled by growing demand for Internet communications and mapping, the number of satellites is skyrocketing, and that's seeing more commercial companies shoot for the stars.

[00:04:36] Speaker 2: The number of satellites to be used by humanity is increasing rapidly. We will go from, well, around 8,000, 10,000 satellites we have right now to 40,000, 50,000 satellites in maybe 10 years' time.

[00:04:52] Speaker 1: Back at the S-Range launch pad, liftoff is fast approaching for the German Mafias rocket. And for the final steps, powerful motors are put in place. You can't see it from here, but inside that tower is the rocket, and it's standing by, ready for launch. Inside the control room, the team are preparing for liftoff.

[00:05:15] Speaker 2: Those two top screens are inside the conical shape. It takes a week to prepare the rocket motors, and then, of course, prepare the actual payload.

[00:05:27] Speaker 1: However, it turns out the launch is postponed. Lie up in the stratosphere. It's too windy. But we didn't have to wait long, and we're soon making our way back again in the middle of the night. From a safe distance away, we wait for the final countdown.

[00:05:47] Speaker 4: Three, two, one, go.

[00:05:54] Speaker 1: We have liftoff. And then, a roaring second motor kicks in. Wow, there it goes. It happened so fast, but it was pretty exciting. Back in the control room, there are celebrations.

[00:06:11] Speaker 5: The flight itself went super well. It was even a bit higher than we expected, and we landed right on point. It was a good flight. We're really relieved.

[00:06:20] Speaker 1: For this spaceport, it's one small step. But there might soon be a giant leap.