Four private astronauts launch on first human mission to fly over the poles
“I call it the last frontier of unexplored territory in low-Earth orbit.”
With thunderstorms just offshore, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket streaks into the sky over Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin the all-private Fram2 mission.
Credit:
SpaceX
Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire.
The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida’s east coast.
The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes.
Chun Wang, born in China and now a citizen of Malta, paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for the opportunity to fly to space and bring three hand-picked crewmates along with him. SpaceX likely charged between $100 million and $200 million for the flight. Chun made his fortune as a crypto pioneer, co-founding F2Pool, once the world’s largest bitcoin mining company. He named his mission Fram2 in honor of the Norwegian exploration ship Fram used for polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century.
No one saw Earth’s poles from space in the more than 400 human spaceflight missions preceding Fram2. The closest any crew mission has gotten to the poles was the Soviet Union’s Vostok 6 mission in 1963, when Valentina Tereshkova’s spacecraft reached a latitude of 65.1 degrees.
Something new
Chun didn’t want to pay for a mission to repeat the well-trodden path to the International Space Station, or fly in a higher-altitude orbit as SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission did last year with billionaire commander Jared Isaacman and three crewmates. He wanted to try something new.
“Jared spent a lot of effort trying to fly as high as possible because he has a pilot background,” Chun said in response to a question from Ars. “But here on this mission, we have a group of polar explorers. We will do this from an explorer’s perspective. I don’t want to repeat the same mission profile again and again. I have less interest in flying to ISS because every previous mission flies to the ISS again, again and again.”
Chun was inspired by Isaacman’s first foray into orbit on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021. That was the first fully commercial human spaceflight to low-Earth orbit without any significant government involvement. Isaacman is President Trump’s nominee to become the next NASA administrator.
“So, if we do not challenge Jared, if we do not repeat the previous mission, where else we can go given our current hardware we have in 2025? What Dragon can do is to fly into low-Earth orbit, and there is a big bunch of area in low-Earth orbit that hasn’t been explored.”
Eric Philips, Rabea Rogge, Chun Wang, and Jannicke Mikkelsen make up the Fram2 crew.
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SpaceX
Chun is a prolific traveler, logging each flight in great detail with his social media posts. Less than an hour before liftoff Monday night, he posted on X: “36th flight of 2025: SpaceX Fram2 from LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, via the South Pole and the North Pole, to Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles or Oceanside. Crew Dragon C207 ‘Resilience.’ This is my 1,000th flight of all time.”
The Fram2 mission will last between three-and-a-half and five-and-a-half days, ending with a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California.
Chun takes the role of mission commander for Fram2. Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker and cinematographer, is the vehicle commander. During launch, she monitored the progress of the ascent on the Dragon spacecraft’s touchscreen displays. The vehicle’s pilot is Rabea Rogge, a robotics researcher from Germany. Mission specialist Eric Philips of Australia rounds out the crew. He is a veteran polar explorer and guide who has completed dozens of ski expeditions to the North and South Poles.
All four crew members share an interest in adventure and polar exploration. Mikkelsen lives on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago inside the Arctic Circle. Before going to space, she worked on feature films, David Attenborough nature documentaries, and an immersive 3D concert experience with Queen, among other projects.
Now, she’s in command of the Dragon spacecraft as it loops some 267 miles (430 kilometers) over the poles, traveling at nearly 5 miles per second. “I call it the last frontier of unexplored territory in low-Earth orbit,” Mikkelsen said.
The firsts of Fram2
Fram2 is breaking new ground in other areas, too. It’s the first human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit without a trained pilot onboard, and the first crewed spaceflight without an American, Russian, or Chinese astronaut.
Later this week, Fram2 will become SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon mission to splash down off the West Coast. SpaceX announced last year it would relocate its fleet of recovery ships from Florida to California, allowing Dragon capsules to return to the Pacific.
This move will resolve concerns about Dragon’s unpressurized trunk section reentering the atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner. All Crew Dragon flights to date—Fram2 is SpaceX’s 17th crew mission—jettisoned the disposable trunk in orbit before reentry and splashdown off the coast of Florida.
The trunk lacks a propulsion system, so atmospheric drag pulls it out of orbit several weeks or months later. The reentry of the trunk is unpredictable, and a few missions have scattered debris over land. With the switch to the West Coast, SpaceX will keep the trunk attached to the Dragon capsule until just before reentry, when it will cast away the trunk to fall into the remote Pacific Ocean.
Chun and his crewmates hope to view Antarctica and the North Pole through Dragon’s windows. With ideal viewing conditions, astronauts on the ISS occasionally capture images showing the edges of Greenland and Antarctica at oblique angles. Satellites flying over the poles routinely observe the poles, but Fram2 will offer Dragon’s four-person crew the human experience.
The Fram2 mission lifted off from Launch Complex 39A in Florida.
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SpaceX
“Fram2 isn’t just about going to space, it’s about pushing boundaries and sharing knowledge,” Chun said.
Mikkelsen will use her expertise to shoot immersive, 3D imagery from Dragon. She got an assist on camera settings from NASA astronaut Don Pettit, a master of spaceflight photography who currently resides on the ISS.
“I’m looking forward to being the first human in history to be able to point my camera at the North Pole and South Pole from space,” Mikkelsen said. “There will be a lot of specific moments, specifically focusing on the aurora. This is also a mission where people on the ground on planet Earth can attend, and we’ve reached out to 2.2 million auroral citizen scientists. Anyone can join, where you go outside and if there is aurora where you live, you note where you live, and you register on the SolarMaX mission website, and you will take a photo of the aurora at the same time as we in Fram2 fly over the aurora.”
Mikkelsen built mockups of the Dragon spacecraft to practice her shooting method. Now in space, Mikkelsen has a finite time period to complete her photography.
“Being a cinematographer in space is not easy,” she said. “It is not like filming on planet Earth, and it’s quite comparable to being a cinematographer in the North Pole region, where it is exceptionally hazardous to work. Battery life is extremely hard to maintain when you work in the cold in the polar regions, and we actually have a limit for how much battery power we can safely bring with us in Dragon.”
The Fram2 astronauts carry with them 22 experiments from eight countries, primarily addressing physiological and psychological questions like the brain’s response to the space environment, astronaut cognition and crew cohesion, and measure the crew’s radiation exposure. On balance, a trajectory like Fram2’s path over the poles will subject the astronauts to higher radiation levels than the International Space Station.
“These… experiments really deal with two questions, I would say,” said Rogge, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “One is, ‘How does the human adapt to extreme environments? In our case, it’s space. But we have a lot of studies that are looking at comparing space to other extreme environments. That could be the polar environments, which we are very familiar with. That could be even COVID as an extreme isolation environment, right? The goal is to learn how we can best operate.
“And the second question really is also about accessibility because right now, I think the stereotype of an astronaut is that you have to be this super-human, medically perfect,” Rogge said. “But we should really flip this question and be like, ‘OK, how do we design for living and working in space for everyone?”
In this vein, Fram2’s crew will test a “portable gym” for exercise inside Dragon. The space station has large exercise devices that won’t fit inside the limited volume of Dragon. Fram2 carries a Starlink laser terminal to link up with SpaceX’s broadband network and provide high-speed Internet to the crew.
The mission will also grow mushrooms in space for the first time. “They’re not the ones you’re thinking,” Philips quipped.
Fram2 is SpaceX’s third all-private crew missions, following Isaacman’s two commercial flights in 2021 and 2024. Isaacman is an experienced pilot of high-performance aircraft, and in some ways, fits the mold of a professional NASA astronaut.
With Fram2, SpaceX is flying a crew of space enthusiasts and polar explorers who are used to working in extreme environments. But none came to SpaceX with proficiencies in human spaceflight.
“From a crew training perspective, we’ve really started to refine how do we train four folks that have no traditional background in spaceflight to get ready for a mission,” said Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon and Dragon programs. “We figured out, how do we train these extraordinary individuals to hop in a capsule, get flung at 17,500 miles per hour under 1 million pounds of propellant, and be calm about it.”
Being calm about it. From her station in the commander’s seat of the Dragon spacecraft named Resilience—Mikkelsen rattled off the standard radio callouts, noting milestones throughout Fram2’s climb into space. If all goes according to plan, the entire flight will be automated from liftoff through splashdown.
“Dragon is an autonomous vehicle, and we need to understand how she talks to us,” Mikkelsen said before the launch. “Resilience, to me, she is a female, and she is going to have her own personality, and we are learning how to navigate the systems. We are learning how to set her up to best way possible operate autonomously, and we know that we have Mission Control with us at all times.”
A polar view from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft shortly after launching on the Fram2 mission.
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SpaceX
Chun pitched his idea for a polar orbit mission to SpaceX a few weeks after he traveled to South Texas to witness the first test flight of the company’s enormous Starship rocket, intended to be the eventual replacement for Falcon 9 and Dragon. SpaceX announced the Fram2 mission last August, when the crew was already well into training.
SpaceX fitted the Dragon spacecraft with a cupola window, the same one that flew on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, to provide the astronauts more expansive views than they would get through the capsule’s smaller porthole windows.
From space, Rogge hopes to spot some of the research stations that dot the frozen landscape of Antarctica. But the crew won’t get a clear view of the South Pole itself, the home of a National Science Foundation research station. Fram2 was supposed to launch before the end of last year, when it would have soared over Antarctica when the Sun was highest in the sky and casting long shadows across the icepack.
Now, a couple of weeks after the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere, the Sun has set on the South Pole until September.
“We’re on the dark side of the equinox. We don’t really have that opportunity,” Philips said. “I did actually apply to the National Science Foundation to see if they could light the station up with everything that they’ve got, so that we could have the opportunity to see it, but that wasn’t granted.”
But there are plenty more sights to see. “We’re orbiting over the North and South Poles. The Earth is slowly rotating underneath us, (so) we will fly over every part of Earth.”
Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
