SpaceX's private polar space trip returns to Earth

Yahoo

04-04-2025

The four crew members of the private Fram2 mission returned to Earth on Friday after spending more than 3 1/2 days circling the planet on the first human spaceflight on a polar orbit.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience made a parachute-assisted splashdown off the California coast at 9:19 a.m. Pacific time. The mission launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Monday night.
Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur Chun Wang, now of Malta, paid an undisclosed price for the jaunt to space and a unique view of some of the same places in the Arctic and Antarctica to which he had trekked by land.
He brought along friends and fellow adventurers Eric Philips of Australia, Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway and Rabea Rogge of Germany — all of whom had experience exploring the Arctic.
The California landing was a first for a SpaceX Crew Dragon, although cargo versions of the spacecraft had previously returned off the Pacific Coast before SpaceX moved operations to Florida.
The company made the decision last year, though, to switch back to the Pacific. The move was made for safety reasons after several incidents were reported of debris found on land determined to be remnants of the propulsion module that detaches from Dragon before splashdown.
While the Fram2 mission was a private endeavor, the crew performed 22 research experiments during the trip including taking the first X-ray in space.
The capsule was brought up onto one of SpaceX's recovery vessels less than 30 minutes after landing with interior cameras showing the quartet giving fist bumps to one another and taking selfies.
The four exited the spacecraft within an hour of landing with minimum assistance — part of SpaceX's investigation into crew capabilities for future missions to places like Mars where a recovery crew wouldn't be available.
The return to gravity still made for a few stumbles getting out the hatch, but the four got to their feet all smiles before being escorted away for medical checks.
This marked the completion of Resilience's fourth trip to space after having debuted on NASA's Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station in 2020. That was followed by the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions paid for by billionaire and likely next NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
It's the only Crew Dragon to be outfitted with something other than a forward-facing docking hatch, since its last three flights including this one had not required meeting up with the space station.
Instead, on both Inspiration4 and Fram2, SpaceX installed a nearly 4-foot-wide domed cupola window to allow for 360-degree views while in orbit. On Polaris Dawn, that was switched out for the Skywalker apparatus that let Isaacman perform the first commercial spacewalk.
SpaceX has flown 66 people into space aboard its fleet of four Crew Dragons on 17 missions since 2020. A fifth Dragon is under construction.
The next mission is slated to be the private Axiom Space Ax-4 taking a short trip to the space station with liftoff no earlier than May. After that, SpaceX has the Commercial Crew Program rotational crew mission Crew-11 targeting mid-July to fly up and relieve the Crew-10 mission that arrived to the station last month.
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