It looks like a cut-price version of the set of a Bond movie. Blocky, 60s-style white consoles face a large wall-mounted video screen, each covered in dials and buttons with words like "pump on", "fire" and "liftoff" written on them. Only the slightly shabby appearance of the place and the metre-high inflatable rocket in the corner indicate that this is not the home of cat-stroking villains but a place of academic study.
The operations room of the Esrange space centre near Kiruna in the far north of Sweden is one of a handful of places in the world that perform space launches. The facility, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic circle, is used by the European Space Agency and others to launch rockets and balloons for studying the upper atmosphere and the effects of microgravity. It also serves as a monitoring station for numerous satellites that orbit between the north and south poles.
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