Swedish National Space Agency

The Swedish National Space Agency, known as SNSA, is a government agency in Sweden operating under the Swedish Ministry of Education and Science, serving as a key component of the Swedish space programme that is carried out mostly through international cooperation, including a sequence of national satellite missions and missions conducted with other nations. The agency distributes government grants for research and development, initiates its own research and development in space and remote sensing, and acts as the Swedish point of contact in international cooperative efforts; by the 2010s it had an annual budget of roughly 900 million kronor, about 70 percent of which supported programmes of the European Space Agency judged important to Sweden, and as of 2018 it employed about 30 permanent staff, most working from its office in Solna Municipality near Stockholm. The organization changed its English name from the Swedish National Space Board to the Swedish National Space Agency in 2018.