SubOrbital Express-4

The project:

Suborbital Express is one of SSC’s flagship programs. It is a sounding rocket mission that provides six minutes of microgravity. I was initially honourably tasked to design the mission patch, which then grew into a project where I ended up producing twelve films- allowing our followers on social media to follow the entire mission, from getting to know the science on board the payload to what goes down in the control room during launch.

Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) provides global space services. From its facility Esrange Space Center in Northern Sweden, SSC launches sounding rockets and high-altitude balloons for research in the areas of microgravity, astrophysics, astronomy and atmospheric studies. Besides Esrange, SSC has 16 sites located globally, and recently gained the ability of being the first European mainland spaceport for launching satellites in orbit. Clients range from NASA, CNES, SpaceX, ESA, to many more. 

First, we had to figure it all out: What is this mission about? What message do we want to convey? How do we want to say it? What outcome are we aiming for? To explore our opportunities and arrive to a conclusion, I used the double diamond method:

In the previous Suborbital Express campaign, one of the clients hired a film crew to produce a feature film, elevating the mission's profile. This time, however, there was no plans for such a production from the clients side- but we still wanted to produce something of quality on our end.

Additionally, SSC employees felt generally underrepresented in our external outreach so I kept that in mind. The idea was to create a social media mini-series, allowing followers to track each step of the mission and highlight the incredible people at SSC.

The timeline followed:

First, I designed the patch through many iterations. My initial concept was minimalistic, but the program managers wanted a 10x10cm patch with symbols for Sweden, the rocket, customer and partner logos, key experiments, flags, and names. It felt overwhelming at first, but seeing their happy faces after including everything made it worthwhile. Initially, I questioned why so much had to be in the patch. But after I was invited to Esrange to film the progress of the campaign, and I got to meet every customer, every engineer, all the people from different countries- I finally understood. They were so proud of this mission. They had been working tirelessly on this for years, and seeing themselves represented on the patch meant something for them. The patch became ubiquitous—on shirts, stickers, computers, phones, and more.

So, I’m proud to present the Suborbital Express 4 campaign.

How:

We made the best of what we had. I knew the basics of movie editing but I learned a lot along the way. I started with a basic camera but got approval to upgrade midway. First, I filmed in Solna and spent two weeks at Esrange, living with the team, attending science meetings, filming, scripting, editing, publishing and following every project phase as if I were part of the team. This ensured that I always knew which phases we would focus on for the social media campaign, and allowed me to get a better grasp of sounding rocket missions in general.

The response was amazing. I’ve received more praise than ever, not just about my work but about the people I interviewed. The employees felt proud and their friends and family (and our followers of course) understood the mission phases better, which was my goal. The best feedback was, “My mom loved the film, she finally understood what I work with.”

Below are two more films. To view all of them, please see SSC’s social media channels (IG: ssc_space, LI: SSC - Swedish Space Corporation, FB: SSC - Swedish Space Corporation)

Learnings:

• Creativity is born under constraints, and thrives under freedom.

• Human stories are as important as technical details.

• Being surrounded by dedicated professionals reinforced how important it is to love what you do. Enthusiasm inspires great work.

• If you think people won’t understand the subject, ask people to explain it as to a ten year old.

• I still love space (perhaps more than ever?), and I’m so grateful to be around people who do as well.