Commercial flight over the Earth's poles lands safely

Fram2 crew (from left to right) Eric Philips, Rabea Rogge, Jannicke Mikkelsen and Chun Wang inside the Dragon spacecraft during its water landing on April 4 - Photo: SpaceX

Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX, which provided the rocket and spacecraft for the poleward mission, broadcast the landing live.

Mission to fly over the Earth's poles

The water landing marked the end of a four-day mission called Fram2, in which private astronauts became the first humans to orbit over both the North and South Poles.

Cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang is funding and leading the pioneering mission. Wang is joined on the trip by Norwegian director Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge and Australian explorer Eric Philips. None of the four have flown in space before.

The mission follows other billionaire-backed commercial spaceflight efforts, including Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, both led by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman.

The Fram2 team used the same Dragon spacecraft that the Polaris Dawn team used to fly into orbit on a five-day mission, SpaceX said. They also performed a historic spacewalk.

During the journey, the Fram2 astronauts participated in many experiments to test the effects of spaceflight on the human body.

Landing safely off the coast of California

Wang and his crew landed on the Dragon capsule at 9:19 a.m. Pacific time (11:19 p.m. Vietnam time) off the coast of Oceanside, California, in the North Pacific Ocean.

The water landing came four days after the Fram2 crew capsule was launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket-powered Dragon spacecraft, which launched on March 31 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

After separating from the rocket, the Dragon capsule used its own thrusters to move from pole to pole. The landing off the coast of California marks a new milestone for SpaceX's manned spaceflight.

After the parachute-assisted landing, the four astronauts are expected to exit the spacecraft on their own. According to SpaceX, the goal of this unassisted exit is to “evaluate the astronauts’ ability to perform functional tasks unaided after short or long-duration spaceflight.”

For the first time in history, four astronauts aboard the Dragon spacecraft have embarked on a mission to explore the Earth’s poles. Wang, a Malta-based entrepreneur who made a fortune from Bitcoin mining, has put up an undisclosed sum to fund the mission with SpaceX.

The Fram2 mission is named after a Norwegian ship that crossed the North and South Poles in the early 20th century, in honor of the iconic pioneering journey.

Moving from pole to pole, the crew observed the Earth's polar regions from an altitude equivalent to about 430km above the ground. This altitude allowed the Dragon to fly from the North Pole to the South Pole in just over 46 minutes.

Wang and the crew also conducted 22 research experiments related to human physiology under orbital conditions, aiming to provide data for future long-duration missions into space.

Read more Back to Topics

DAWN

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/chuyen-bay-thuong-mai-qua-hai-cuc-trai-dat-ha-canh-an-toan-20250405162615062.htm