Norwegian Nonsense
Sweden had literally one job, and somehow they still blew it.
As the BBC reports, Sweden made a major whoopsie Monday when its experimental rocket accidentally landed in Norway, its neighbor with whom it shares a border and a longstanding mutual peace.
Launched Monday from the Esrange Space Center, the Swedish Space Center-owned research rocket ended up touching down in the mountains of Norway instead of back in Sweden where it was supposed to — and there appears to have been a breakdown in communication in a sort of he-said, she-said between the Scandinavian neighbors.
The Norwegian foreign ministry told the BBC in a statement that the Swedes did not give any “formal notification” of the landing deviation or the rocket’s recovery — but representatives from Esrange say that authorities on both sides of the border were contacted shortly after the incident.
Although the uncrewed rocket, which was meant to test microgravity conditions and had been created with the help of the European Space Agency, did launch successfully and reached its target altitude of 250 kilometers, its landing trajectory was some 40km northwest of where it was supposed to end up, which put it squarely into Norway’s far-northern territory of Malselv.
Swedish Shenanigans
Luckily, as the BBC and other outlets reported, the rocket landed in an uninhabited area and nobody, including the rocket and its payload, was hurt.
Strangely enough, local authorities in Malselv did tell regional news services that they had been contacted about the rocket’s erroneous landing, and that they were asked if a Swedish helicopter could be sent in to retrieve it.
The rocket’s payload has since been returned to Esrange, and space center representative Marko Kohberg told the BBC that the institution is taking the whole thing “seriously.”
While it’s too soon to tell what really went wrong here, it sounds to us like this whole thing sounds is the result of a chain-of-communication issue — and it’s pretty lucky that this happened between friendly nations and not, you know, in Eastern Europe.
More on rocket fails: Experts Say SpaceX’s Rocket Exploding Was a Huge Success