Astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts have travelled into space since the 1960s, and humans have been in space continuously for the last 25 years – and will be for many more to come. Yet, all those humans tend to travel around the mid-latitudes of the planet, never straying too far north or south. Astronauts have not cast their eyes down on the polar regions, but this will change next week.
The Fram2 mission is expected to launch on Monday, March 31, from the Kennedy Space Center, and it will see the first human crew to go into a polar orbit. The name is a reference to the Norwegian polar ship Fram, used by explorers in expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic regions, including by Roald Amundsen.
Cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur Chun Wang is the mission commander, and the rest of his civilian crew includes vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, pilot Rabea Rogge, and mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips. It is the first space mission for all of them.
“After extensive training and dedication from our entire crew, we are honored to continue the legacy of the Fram name in an exciting era of commercial space exploration,” Wang said in a statement.
“We are thankful for this opportunity, and we are grateful to SpaceX for making this mission a reality we are excited to be the first crew to view and capture the Earth’s polar regions from low Earth orbit and support important research to help advance humanity’s capabilities for long duration space exploration.”
The mission is set to last between three and five days and will conduct a series of interesting experiments, such as hunting for STEVE – an aurora-like phenomenon – as well as performing the first X-ray image of a human in space. The hunt for aurorae is part of the SolarMaX mission, a collaboration with the University Center in Svalbard.
The mission also has educational collaborations that will come to fruition over the orbital permanence. There will be a competition with the ham radio community called Fram2Ham, and the team is working with Ootiboo on The Blue Marble project.
The mission will launch in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, with a viewing cupola like the Intrepid mission. The current launch date is March 31, at 11:20 pm ET (3:20 am UTC, April 1).
