SpaceX plans to make spaceflight history later this year by launching the first crewed mission to explore Earth’s polar regions.
That four-person flight, which SpaceX announced today (August 12), is called Fram2, in honor of Norwegian ship Who made pioneering voyages to the Arctic and Antarctic between 1893 and 1912.
“Fram2 will be piloted by Chun Wang, a Maltese entrepreneur and adventurer,” SpaceX wrote in a blog post. Today’s mission description“Wang aims to use the mission to highlight the crew’s spirit of exploration, instill a sense of wonder and curiosity in the general public, and highlight how technology can help push the boundaries of Earth exploration through mission research.”
Wang will be joined on the FRAM 2 mission by Norwegian Jannik Mikkelsen, who will command the spacecraft; Australian Erik Phillips, who will lead the spacecraft; and German Rabbi Ruge, who will be a mission specialist. All four are new to spaceflight, SpaceX said.
If all goes according to plan, Fram2 will launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast later this year, sending the quartet into orbit in a Crew Dragon capsule. The spacecraft will not connect to the International Space Station (ISS) but will orbit Earth on its own.
During the 3-5 day mission, the crew plans to observe the Earth’s polar regions through the Dragon’s dome at an altitude of 425-450 km. [249 to 264 miles]“We are leveraging insights from astrophysicists and citizen scientists to study unusual light emissions that resemble aurora borealis,” SpaceX wrote in its mission description.
The crew will study green slivers and violet streaks of persistent emission that resemble a phenomenon known as STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), which has been measured at altitudes of about 400 to 500 kilometers. [249 to 311 miles] “Above the Earth’s atmosphere,” the company added.
The Fram2 crew will also study how spaceflight affects the human body; that work will include taking the first-ever X-ray image of a human in space, according to SpaceX.
Related to: How SpaceX astronauts aboard the private Polaris Dawn spacecraft will attempt the first-ever “all-civilian” spacewalk
Fram2 will be SpaceX’s sixth private astronaut mission. Previous missions include Inspiration4, a free flight that launched in September 2021; Ax-1, Ax-2 and Ax-3, flights operated by Houston-based Axiom Space that sent people to and from the International Space Station in April 2022, May 2023 and January to February of this year, respectively; and Polaris Dawn, another free flight currently scheduled to launch on Aug. 26.
The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned missions under the Polaris program. Each of these three missions will be funded and led by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who did the same with Inspiration4.
SpaceX has also launched nine missions to the International Space Station for NASA, starting with the Demo-2 test flight to the orbiting laboratory in 2020.
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