SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Carries Four Astronauts Over Earth’s Poles for the First Time
The National Space Society salutes SpaceX and the crew of Fram2, the first orbital mission to fly across the Earth’s poles. The private astronauts launched on March 31 from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and immediately proceeded into a polar orbit—the first crewed flight in history to do so. Chan Wang, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind the project, said on Twitter/X that he wanted to fly a polar orbit because he met his fellow crewmembers in Norway, and “we fly polar because, in an ISS-like orbit, we are unable to see where we live. From this perspective, the mission has perfectly achieved its goal.” The mission ended on April 4th with a splashdown off the coast of Southern California, the first SpaceX crewed mission to terminate in that region. SpaceX has stated that they will recover Dragon spacecraft near the Pacific Coast to minimize risks to inhabited areas from debris resulting from the reentry of the Crew Dragon’s “trunk” section, which does not survive reentry.
Joining Wang were Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian cinematographer; Rabea Rogge, a polar scientist and engineer; and Eric Philips, a polar explorer. The orbit was inclined 90 degrees from Earth’s equator, handily beating the previous record for orbital inclination, Voskhod 2, which orbited in at 65 degrees in 1965. Fram2’s polar orbit allowed the private astronauts the first-ever firsthand views of the north and south poles and supported some of the 22 science experiments they carried out during the mission, an example of which was the Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE), which could only be conducted in a polar orbit. Another first on the mission was the testing of a compact x-ray machine in space.
”Space tourism holds out the promise of gradually decreasing the cost of reaching orbit with a crewed vehicle as flight rates increase,” said Dale Skran, NSS COO/SVP. “Far from being simply tourists, the crew of the Fram2 mission blazed a path toward a better future for everyone. Their courage and dedication to the advancement of science are to be commended.”
Fram2 was SpaceX’s 17th crewed launch and caps a number of private or semi-private orbital missions by the company. With most functions of the Crew Dragon being highly automated, a diverse range of private astronauts are now able to fly in space with a broader set of mission objectives. The mission was flown aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience on it’s fourth trip into space, which carried the large domed viewing port first used in Jared Isaacman’s Inspiration4 flight. The Falcon 9 booster returned to a SpaceX barge after this, its sixth flight.
