SpaceX launches 4 people on a polar orbit never attempted before

(CNN) — SpaceX on Monday launched its latest mission for paying customers: This time, a Crew Dragon spacecraft is carrying a cryptocurrency billionaire and three guests on a dayslong trip that will orbit directly above Earth’s North and South poles — a feat never attempted before.

The mission, called Fram2, launched from SpaceX’s facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida around 9:46 p.m. ET.

Spearheading the Fram2 mission is Malta resident Chun Wang, who made his fortune running Bitcoin mining operations and paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum of money for this trip.

Joining him are a trio of other polar exploration enthusiasts: Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, Germany-based robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian adventurer Eric Philips.

After taking off from Florida, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket had to fly south — tracing a path that no human spaceflight mission has ever traveled.

The preplanned flight path for Fram2 was also expected to take the crew capsule over Cuba and Panama as the rocket fired the spacecraft toward orbit.

A few minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage booster, which provides the initial burst of power at liftoff, detached from the rocket’s second or upper stage, and headed back for landing on a seafaring barge.

The upper part of the rocket then fired up its own engine and began propelling the crew to orbital speeds — more than 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) — putting the four astronauts on a path to travel directly over Earth’s poles.

The unusual trajectory was chosen to honor the group’s interest in polar exploration. All four crew members are traveling to space for the first time.

“We have an untraditional mission,” Mikkelsen said Friday. “We’re not your typical NASA astronauts. …We’ve gone from nothing to being certified astronauts to fly.”

A rare flight path

Launching a group of people — or satellites — on an orbital path that circumnavigates the North and South poles is no small task.

And it’s rarely done from Florida: East Coast launch sites are ideal for missions that travel directly eastward, because the Earth’s rotation can give rockets flying that direction a significant natural boost.

But Fram2 had to launch southward.

Such a trajectory requires the rocket to expend massive amounts of power — resulting in “a significant loss of performance for that launch vehicle in terms of how much mass it can put into orbit,” said Dr. Craig Kluever, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri, during a phone interview last week.

That doesn’t matter — as the Falcon 9 rocket had enough power to get the Fram2 spacecraft into its intended orbit. But it does raise the question: Why this orbit, exactly?

Though the crew members will carry out 22 research and science experiments during their days in space, most involve evaluating crew health and could be carried out regardless of their flight path.

So putting Fram2 into polar orbit may have more to do with planning a distinctive mission — rather than one ideally suited for science.

“This is a private mission. You need something to say that’s different and exciting about it,” said Dr. Christopher Combs — the associate dean of research at the Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design at the University of Texas at San Antonio — of Fram2.

“It’s interesting that nobody’s ever actually done a true polar orbit,” Combs added, “and it’s great that we’ve got commercial providers that are making space travel increasingly routine.”

In his mind, Combs added, flying a human spaceflight mission around the poles is “a notch above gimmick, but not exactly a groundbreaking milestone.”

SpaceX has flown satellites into polar orbit from Florida before, using a dogleg maneuver that required SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to fly eastward over the Atlantic Ocean before veering sharply to the south.

Meet the Fram2 crew

It’s not clear how much Wang paid SpaceX for this mission. Two cryptocurrency experts CNN reached out to for this story said Wang tends to keep a lower profile than most people in the blockchain investment community, and not much is known about him.

Wang is the cofounder of F2Pool, an organization that uses a network of computers to mine for Bitcoin, which involves solving complex mathematical problems.

​F2Pool is prominent, responsible for about 11% of the total Bitcoin “hashrate” — or the total computational power being used to mine for coins.

Wang’s net worth is ostensibly in the billions, though an exact figure is not clear.

Blockchain endeavors aside, during the audio-only event conducted on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s X platform on Friday, it was evident that Wang and his crewmates are polar enthusiasts.

Mikkelsen, for example, is Wang’s neighbor in Svalbard, a group of remote Norwegian islands near the North Pole, and a dedicated adventurer herself. As a cinematographer and director, she has focused her work on sci-fi and documentary projects and developing technology to film in harsh and remote environments, according to her website. She plans to make a film about this mission.

Rogge is a doctoral candidate researching navigation, guidance and control for automated vehicles traversing harsh conditions, according to a Norwegian University of Science and Technology webpage. She is also the first German woman to fly to orbit.

Philips is a full-time explorer and guide who has carried out about 30 excursions to Earth’s polar regions since 1992, according to his website and remarks he made Friday.

He described the environment as “incredibly hostile” on Friday.

“And what a perfect comparison to us being inside Dragon as we orbit around the North and South poles for three to five days,” Philips added. “It’s that kind of same blizzard experience. We’ve got four people locked inside … an incredibly harsh environment.”

The group began training for the Fram2 mission last year, and the preparations have included sequestering in “harsh environments” in Alaska as well as training at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Wang said recently that he was not nervous or anxious about the upcoming mission, according a post he shared on social media platform X.

“Now, everything needs to be done has been done. From here on, it’s just following the procedures. Excited doesn’t belong to me anymore,” Wang said.

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