The real life space base

The main character in "Rock Hopper" lives in the north of Sweden near the town Jukkasjärvi, today mostly famous for the Icehotel that is built from scratch every winter using - you guessed it - ice. I've stayed at the hotel (well, a version of it) and I highly recommend the experience. Now, not far from this town there's an actual space base. It's called Esrange and they launch rockets to place satellites in orbit. Since it's located above the Artic Circle it's a pretty good place to launch rockets from - with, as they say, "access to a vast, unpopulated impact and recovery area".

In my novel, I imagine Esrange in the future being this deteriorated old space base that was decommissioned after the Satellite War (more about that in a later post). It was an important frontier during the war, run by the US military to launch attacks on Russian and Chinese satellites. After the war, it was turned into a scrap yard with wrecked space ships lying around and most of the US military withdrawn back to American soil. Post-war Sweden is a dystopian place after the society fell apart in the 20's and 30's. It's the perfect place to begin the story about a young person, down and out, going for the big break.