WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft March 31 on a private astronaut mission that is the first crewed spaceflight to pass over the poles.
A Falcon 9 lifted off at 9:47 p.m. Eastern from the Kennedy Space Center, carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft Resilience. The spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage about 10 minutes later.
Resilience is flying a mission called Fram2, the sixth non-NASA flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft. Fram2 is the first crewed mission to go into a polar orbit, with an inclination of 90 degrees, allowing it to fly directly over the north and south poles from low Earth orbit. Previously, the highest inclination flown on a crewed flight was 65 degrees on early Soviet Vostok missions.
The mission commander of Fram2 is Chun Wang, a cryptocurrency billionaire born in China but who now claims citizenship in Malta. He and SpaceX announced plans for Fram2 in August 2024, with original plans calling for a launch as soon as late that year.
During a pre-flight discussion held on social media March 28, Wang said he was driven to pursue the mission by his “lifelong curiosity” including about the polar regions. “As a kid, I used to stare at the blank white space at the bottom of world maps, wondering what was out there,” he recalled.
He said was wanted to do something unique on Fram2 by flying a mission over the poles. “I don’t want to repeat the same mission profile again and again,” he said, such as a mission to the International Space Station. “I have less interest in flying to ISS.”
Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian cinematographer, is the vehicle commander for Fram2, overseeing Dragon operations in “dynamic phases” of flight, notably launch and splashdown. “As the vehicle commander, you have to learn how to talk to Dragon and how Dragon talks back to you,” she said during the prelaunch event.
Rabea Rogge, a robotics researcher from Germany, is the mission pilot and the first German woman to go into orbit. She noted that while she will support Mikkelsen monitoring spacecraft displays, Dragon is largely an automated vehicle. She will also be responsible for collecting data during the flight.
Eric Philips, a professional polar explorer from Australia who has been to the poles about 30 times, is the mission specialist and medical officer for Fram2. “It’s an incredible opportunity for me,” he said, comparing the upcoming trip in Dragon to spending several days in a tent during a polar blizzard.
Besides being the first crewed mission to fly over the poles, the Fram2 mission will conduct 22 experiments from eight countries. The diverse set of experiments range from observations of polar aurora to tests of crew health to studying how mushrooms grow in microgravity.
That diverse set of payloads includes many selected by SpaceX itself for the mission. “When I first sat down with the Fram crew and asked what kind of research they were excited about, they really emphasized exploration, and so we found a lot of things that are firsts and are also going to help us on way to explore the universe,” said Marissa Rosenberg, senior medical research engineer at SpaceX, during the launch webcast.
That includes the first X-ray machine to fly in space, which can be used to take medical X-rays as well as perform X-ray inspections of equipment. Another will test a device to allow exercise in the constrained volume of Dragon by reducing blood flow to the legs, maximizing the effect of exercise in the space available.
The crew will also leave the capsule on their own after splashdown to test how future crews can exit spacecraft on missions to the moon and beyond. “When you land on the moon or Mars or any planetary surface, there’s not going to be any recovery team there to greet you,” she said. “We really want to start understanding what crews are capable of right when they land.”
Chun Wang (third from left) will command the Fram2 private astronaut mission launching on a Crew Dragon as soon as late 2024. Credit: SpaceX
Dragon will spend about three and a half days in orbit before returning to Earth. The mission will be the first Crew Dragon mission to splash down off the California coast after all previous missions returned off the Florida coast.
SpaceX announced the change in recovery plans last July to prevent debris from the trunk section of Dragon, which on past flights has been jettisoned before the reentry burn, to make an uncontrolled reentry. Portions of the trunk have survived reentry and reached the ground in locations ranging from Australia to North Carolina to, most recently, Morocco.
On Fram2 and subsequent Dragon missions, the spacecraft will do the deorbit burn with the trunk attached and then jettison it. “That guarantees that it’s going to come in in a controlled way. We know pretty much exactly where it’s going to come in,” Jon Edwards, vice president of Falcon and Dragon at SpaceX, said at the pre-launch event. Shifting splashdowns to California will ensure any trunk debris splashes down in the ocean.
For SpaceX, it marks a return to California, which hosted splashdowns of the first-generation cargo Dragon. “Weather is typically better on the West Coast,” he said, with more favorable ground-level winds. The main challenge is the marine layer of clouds, which can limit helicopter operations to support crew recovery.
This mission also required a new trajectory for the Falcon 9 launch, going south just off the Florida coast. “Dragon is basically programmed to dodge Florida, Cuba, Panama and Peru,” Edwards said, ensuring that in an abort that the capsule would land in the water.
Fram2 does build on some earlier missions, including the two previous Crew Dragon missions that did not go to the ISS, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn. Fram2 is using the same large window, or cupola, in the nose first flown on Inspiration4, said Kiko Donchev, vice president of launch at SpaceX.
“I think we could have flown this mission earlier had the mission design come,” he said. “We like to stack new things off of capabilities we’ve built before.”
“This mission is not a cookie-cutter,” Edwards said.
