SpaceX’s Fram2 launch sends civilian crew into first flight around Earth’s poles

A wealthy Chinese-born bitcoin entrepreneur, a Norwegian cinematographer, a German robotics expert and an Australian adventurer blasted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Monday, kicking off the first crewed flight over the North and South poles.

Using a first stage booster making its sixth fight — another first for a Crew Dragon — liftoff from historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center came on time at 9:46 p.m. EDT.

Lighting up the night sky, the Falcon 9 initially climbed straight up and then arced over onto a due south trajectory along Florida’s east coast before soaring out over the Gulf on a course carrying it above Cuba and Panama toward a polar orbit.

After dropping off the first stage for a successful droneship landing, the rocket’s upper stage shut down 10 minutes after liftoff and the Crew Dragon was released to fly on its own. It is expected to fly over the North and South Poles 55 times between Monday night and splashdown Friday in the Pacific Ocean.

“On behalf of the SpaceX team, we’re honored to deliver you safely to your polar orbit,” radioed Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s former director of space operations and now a senior manager at SpaceX. “Enjoy the views of the poles, send us some pictures. Our hearts and our minds will be flying with you … Have a great flight.”

Who are the private adventurers on the Fram2 mission?

Chun Wang, a Chinese-born citizen of Malta who lives mostly in the extreme north of Norway, paid SpaceX an undisclosed amount to charter the Crew Dragon “Resilience” for a trip in polar orbit. The deal marks SpaceX’s third privately funded civilian space tourism flight.

“My own journey has been shaped by lifelong curiosity and a fascination with pushing boundaries,” Chun (pronounced choon) told reporters Friday. “As a kid, I used to stare at a blank white space at the bottom of a world map and wonder what’s out there.

“Curiosity eventually took me across the continent and to the southern most tip of Earth in 2021, and also the North Pole in 2023, and now, soon, into space.” The flight, he added, “isn’t just about going to space. It’s about pushing boundaries, sharing knowledge … and we hope our mission will further inspire later people to do the same.”

Chun named the mission after the 19th century sailing ship Fram — “forward” in Norwegian — that carried arctic pioneers to the polar regions in the 1800s. A small piece of Fram’s teak decking was carried into space aboard the Crew Dragon.

“Pretty wild to see the Fram adventurers sailing to the poles once again, over 130 years from (the original ship’s) christening,” SpaceX’s launch director radioed the crew. “This time, though, with Starlink. Cheers.”

A veteran world traveler, Chun offered the Crew Dragon’s three other seats to a trio of explorers he met during a recent polar trip. Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian cinematographer, is the designated vehicle commander, joined by German roboticist Rabea Rogge as the mission pilot.

The fourth member of the crew is Australian Eric Philips, a professional polar tour guide, adventurer and veteran of some 30 trips to the North and South poles. He is serving as the crew’s medical officer.

Some might view the crew as seasoned adventurers and now, space tourists. In an interview with CBS News, Mikkelsen made it clear the crew is well qualified, but she said “space tourists” doesn’t reflect the extensive training required by SpaceX.

“I wish it was tourism,” she said. “But our education has lasted well over a year, so I have never studied so hard for a three-and-a-half-day expedition in my life.”

History of private space flights

Chun said he was inspired to book the mission by the example set by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who chartered SpaceX’s first two fully commercial missions, and fellow billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who flew to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

“I owe my inspiration to Jared,” Chun posted on X. “If it weren’t for @yousuckMZ and @rookisaacman taking the first step, I would have never had the courage to book an entire spaceship and bring along three people I had only met once before. I also copied many good practices from his previous missions — hope he doesn’t mind.”

Isaacman, who owns and flies a Russian fighter jet, is the Trump administration’s nominee to serve as NASA’s next administrator.

Unlike Isaacman, no one on the Fram2 mission is a licensed pilot. While Blue Origin has launched non-pilot crews to the edge of space in sub-orbital New Shepard flights, no crew has flown to orbit without at least one crew member with aviation expertise or astronaut experience.

SpaceX says Fram2 will help refine training procedures aimed at opening up spaceflight to more and more non-professionals.

“As a roboticist, I’m so hyped about Dragon being an autonomous vehicle which really, I think, shows you how much times are changing in the space sector,” Rogge said. “We are really at a crucial point in time where the spacecraft does so many of the tasks itself.

“I think that really spearheads the accessibility to space, right? Because the dream is (to) have many people in space if we want to live and work there as a civilization.”

She added, “right now I think the stereotype of an astronaut is that, you know, super, super, super human, medically perfect. But we should really flip this question and be like, OK, how do we design living and working in space for everyone?”

Plans for orbiting around the poles

The crew plans to carry out 22 experiments during the flight, ranging from filming auroral displays from orbit to testing compact exercise equipment for use in smaller spacecraft, growing oyster mushrooms in microgravity and taking the first X-rays in space.

Along with three high-end professional cameras, the crew is equipped with four iPad Minis, two iPhone Pro Max cellphones, three laptop computers, a ham radio “and even an X-ray generator, which we’ll use to capture the first-ever X-ray image of the human body in space — something crucial for future long-duration missions to Mars and beyond,” Chun posted on X.

Also on board: a Starlink laser terminal mounted in the Crew Dragon’s lower trunk section that will give the crew, in theory, data relay speeds of up to 100 gigabytes per second or better.

To reach the planned orbit around the poles, one tilted 90 degrees to Earth’s equator, the flight plan called for the Falcon 9 to follow a due-south trajectory carrying the crew above southern Florida, Cuba and Panama on the way to space. The 273-mile-high orbit will allow 55 passes above the poles between launch and splashdown.

Jon Edwards, a SpaceX vice president who oversee Falcon 9 flight operations, said the Crew Dragon’s flight software was modified to ensure the vehicle passes safely over populated areas, guiding the rocket as needed to keep the capsule or other components well away from any populated areas in an emergency.

“We’re going to fly out of 39A in Florida and go pretty much straight south,” Edwards said. “In fact, the flight path is going to go over Florida. If you were in Miami and you looked straight up, you know, at the right time. would see the rocket and the crew flying right overhead.

“What we call the instantaneous impact points, which is where, if we cut power, it would land, that will stay offshore, so it’s totally safe to do this. But it will be flying over Florida and over Cuba and Panama and just to the west of Peru and Ecuador.”

NASA and the U.S. Space Force routinely launch military satellites and science probes into polar orbits from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, where rockets can fly due south over the Pacific Ocean without passing over populated areas.

But the maximum inclination for orbital payloads launched from the East Coast has traditionally been limited to avoid flying over areas where debris from a catastrophic failure might fall. In recent years, SpaceX has launched satellites into polar or near-polar orbits from Cape Canaveral, but no piloted flights.

While NASA and the Air Force once planned to launch space shuttles into polar orbit from Vandenberg, the military space program changed priorities in the wake of the 1986 Challenge disaster and those plans were shelved six months before the initial flight.

The polar orbit will provide spectacular views for the Fram2 crew that Mikkelsen plans to document, from the ice caps to shimmering auroras. The public is invited to share the experience, photographing auroras at the same time Fram2 is capturing the view from space.

“We have reached out to 2.2 million auroral citizen scientists,” she said. “And anyone can join, where you go outside if there is aurora where you live and you note where you live and you … take a photo of the aurora at the same time as we and Fram2 fly over.

“Local observatories are also activating their instruments so that we get this incredible data bank during our mission of the aurora from Earth and from space at the same time so we can understand … what the phenomena can bring to humankind and specifically to satellite technology.”

Chun said the Fram2 mission is expected to last three days and 14 hours from launch to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the southern California coast.