Bitcoin investor blasts off on groundbreaking SpaceX flight over North and South Poles

Independent

01-04-2025

A SpaceX rocket carrying the first all-private polar mission launched Monday night from Florida, marking a new era in human spaceflight.
The mission, funded by crypto-entrepreneur Chun Wang, is the first to send a crew over both the North and South Poles.
Wang, a Chinese-born, Malta-based entrepreneur, secured the flight with SpaceX but has not disclosed the cost of the three-and-a-half day journey.
The Falcon rocket, lifting off from Nasa 's Kennedy Space Center, charted a southerly course over the Atlantic, a trajectory unlike any taken in over six decades of space travel.
The crew's initial flight leg, from Florida to the South Pole, was estimated to take just 30 minutes.
From their targeted orbital altitude of approximately 270 miles (430 kilometers), the fully automated capsule will circumnavigate the globe in roughly 90 minutes, with each pole-to-pole transit lasting around 46 minutes.
For Wang, who has already explored both polar regions on Earth, this mission offers a new perspective. He aims to observe these icy landscapes from space, while also emphasizing the importance of 'pushing boundaries, sharing knowledge'.
Accompanying Wang are three people with extensive polar experience: Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker; Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher; and Eric Philips, an Australian polar guide.
Mikkelsen, the first Norwegian bound for space, has flown over the poles before, but at a much lower altitude. She was part of the 2019 record-breaking mission that circumnavigated the world via the poles in a Gulfstream jet to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's moon landing.
The crew plans two dozen experiments – including taking the first human X-rays in space – and brought along more cameras than usual to document their journey called Fram2 after the Norwegian polar research ship from more than a century ago.
Until now, no space traveler had ventured beyond 65 degrees north and south latitude, just shy of the Arctic and Antarctic circles. The first woman in space, the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova, set that mark in 1963. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and other pioneering cosmonauts came almost as close, as did NASA shuttle astronauts in 1990.
A polar orbit is ideal for climate and Earth-mapping satellites as well as spy satellites. That's because a spacecraft can observe the entire world each day, circling Earth from pole to pole as it rotates below.
Geir Klover, director of the Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway, where the original polar ship is on display, hopes the trip will draw more attention to climate change and the melting polar caps. He lent the crew a tiny piece of the ship's wooden deck that bears the signature of Oscar Wisting, who with Roald Amundsen in the early 1900s became the first to reach both poles.
Wang pitched the idea of a polar flight to SpaceX in 2023, two years after U.S. tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman made the first of two chartered flights with Musk's company. Isaacman is now in the running for NASA's top job.
SpaceX's Kiko Dontchev said late last week that the company is continually refining its training so 'normal people' without traditional aerospace backgrounds can 'hop in a capsule ... and be calm about it.'
Wang and his crew view the polar flight like camping in the wild and embrace the challenge.
'Spaceflight is becoming increasingly routine and, honestly, I'm happy to see that,' Wang said via X last week.
Wang said he's been counting up his flights since his first one in 2002, flying on planes, helicopters and hot air balloons in his quest to visit every country. So far, he's visited more than half. He arranged it so that liftoff would mark his 1,000th flight.