SpaceX on Monday launched its latest mission for paid customers. Cryptocurrency investor Chun Wang, and three others were carried by a Crew Dragon spacecraft, on a days-long trip that will orbit directly above Earth’s North and South poles. This is the first time this feat has been attempted.
This mission has been named Fram2, after a Norwegian polar exploration ship from the 1800s. The spacecraft was launched from SpaceX’s facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the liftoff timed around 9:46 p.m. ET.
Chun Wang is a Malta resident, who made his fortune running Bitcoin mining operations and paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum of money for this trip. He is joined by a trio of polar exploration enthusiasts, Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, Germany-based robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian adventurer Eric Philips. All four of them are flying to space for the first time.
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“We have an untraditional mission,” Mikkelsen said Friday. “We’re not your typical NASA astronauts. …We’ve gone from nothing to being certified astronauts to fly.”
A short 2.5 minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster shut down its nine Merlin engines, executed stage separation from the rest of the rocket and performed a deceleration burn to put itself on a trajectory to land on SpaceX’s droneship in the Atlantic Ocean, which happened on schedule about 5.5 minutes later. The Falcon 9’s second stage continued into low Earth orbit and released Resilience to fly on its own just under 10 minutes after liftoff. The crew will spend the next three to five days circling the poles, viewing it in a way no other humans have.
Fram2 is SpaceX’s 17th human spaceflight overall, and the sixth launched for private customers. This launch came two weeks and three days after the liftoff of SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission to the ISS for NASA (which included rescuing stranded astronauts Sunita William and Butch Wilmore back to earth) — the shortest time to date between SpaceX astronaut launches. Following the three-to-four-day spaceflight, the Fram2 mission is expected to end with a Pacific Ocean splashdown.