4 space tourists splash down after traveling an orbit never attempted before

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(CNN) — SpaceX is wrapping up the latest chapter in its commercial human spaceflight endeavors with the return of Fram2. The mission carried four passengers in a unique orbit around Earth that allowed humans to pass directly over the North and South poles for the first time.

Led by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who is the financier of this mission, the Fram2 crew had been free-flying through orbit since Monday.

The group splashed down at 9:19 a.m. PT, or 12:19 p.m. ET, off the coast of California — the first West Coast landing in SpaceX’s five-year history of human spaceflight missions. The company is livestreaming the splashdown and recovery of the capsule on its website.

During the journey, the Fram2 crew members were slated to carry out various research projects, including capturing images of auroras from space and documenting their experiences with motion sickness.

The ailment proved to be a significant issue for the crew, according to social media posts from Wang, who made his fortune with Bitcoin mining operations and is an avid traveler on Earth.

“The first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable,” Wang said in a post on X, the social media platform owned by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “Space motion sickness hit all of us — we felt nauseous and ended up vomiting a couple of times. It felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea. You could still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even a small sip of water could upset your stomach and trigger vomiting.”

Fortunately, Wang added, “By the second morning, I felt completely refreshed.”

The crew has since shared a batch of images and videos, captured from a bulbous window — or cupola — at the tip of the 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon capsule.

Wang said he was surprised to see that Antarctica appeared “only pure white” and “no human activity (was) visible” from his vantage point aboard the spacecraft.

Riding along with Wang are Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, Germany-based robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian adventurer Eric Philips. All four Fram2 crew members have ties to polar exploration.

Fram2 is “an untraditional mission,” Mikkelsen said at a March 28 discussion on X. “We’re not your typical NASA astronauts. … We’ve gone from nothing to being certified astronauts to fly.”

A few firsts

This trip is privately funded, and such missions allow for SpaceX’s customers to spend their time in space as they see fit. For Fram2, the crew traveled to orbit prepared to carry out 22 research and science experiments, some of which were designed and overseen by SpaceX. Most of the research involves evaluating crew health.

Upon the planned splashdown return off the coast of California, for example, the crew aims to carry out an “egress experiment.”

That objective will test the passengers’ ability to exit their spacecraft on their own after returning to Earth. After most human spaceflight missions, astronauts are aided by personnel on the ground. (However, most of these missions carry astronauts to the space station, where they live in microgravity for months, which means returning crew must readapt to Earth’s gravity.)

“What we expect this to look like is the crews, one at a time, getting out of their seats by themselves, taking off their foot rests, bending down to grab their survival gear, which weighs about 35 pounds,” said Marissa Rosenberg, a senior medical research engineer at SpaceX, during a webcast of the Fram2 splashdown.

The egress experiment will be just one of the attempted “firsts” related to this splashdown. Another involves the landing site: A crewed SpaceX mission has never returned from space and splashed down off the coast of California. The comapny’s crewed missions so far have returned near Florida.

The company has said it will move its recovery operations to the West Coast for safety reasons. The Dragon capsule must eject a cylindrical attachment at its base — called the trunk — as it reenters the atmosphere. And returning from space in California helps ensure that piece of hardware is safely disposed of in the ocean, rather than risking its disposal over land.

What the Fram2 crew did in space

Satellites are routinely launched into orbit around Earth’s poles. So while the Fram2 crew’s view from space has previously been captured, it’s being experienced through human eyes for the first time.

No crewed mission has ever traveled directly over the planet’s poles from Earth orbit. The frigid caps of our home planet are invisible to humans on board the International Space Station, for example, which orbits near Earth’s equatorial line.

Before Fram2, a 1963 Soviet mission called Vostok 6 — carrying Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to travel to space — came the closest to a polar orbit, flying at a 65-degree inclination. Fram2, however, aimed for a 90-degree orientation, meaning it’s flying perpendicular to the equator.

From orbit, the Fram2 crew was able to set its sights on Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands near the North Pole where the Fram2 participants met. And Wang highlighted the uniqueness of their vantage point.

“I often say Fram2 is a Svalbard mission. We @framonauts all met on Svalbard, and we love the ice,” Wang wrote in a post shared Thursday evening. “The mission was planned when I lived there, and we fly polar because, in an ISS-like orbit, we are unable to see where we live. From this perspective, the mission has perfectly achieved its goal.”

Putting the Fram2 crew and spacecraft into polar orbit may have more to do with planning a distinctive mission — rather than one ideally suited for science, 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.

“This is a private mission. You need something to say that’s different and exciting about it,” Combs said.

Orbital trajectory aside, the crew members were able to lend their bodies to research, perhaps expanding knowledge of how humans can optimally live and work within the confines of a tiny spacecraft — something that may be necessary for months at a time if humans ever venture to Mars.

The Fram2 crew’s research included Mikkelsen and Rogge using urine testing strips to measure their hormone levels in an attempt to gather novel health data about how women are affected by spaceflight. The two astronauts each wore a wellness-tracking Oura Ring, which collected data about how well they slept in the confines of the capsule with no gravity. The crewmates also attempted to grow mushrooms in space and have allowed their brains to be mapped and imaged for science.

Dr. Eric Donovan, an aurora expert with the University of Calgary’s department of physics and astronomy, also told CNN that he was excited by the prospect of seeing new images of aurora-like light shows from space.

Donovan is one of the world’s foremost experts on Steve, a light spectacle that has only recently been studied and is occasionally visible in northern latitudes during an aurora.

Taking photographs of aurora and other polar light shows has not been done extensively from space, as astronauts on the International Space Station can typically only attempt to capture such photographs in their spare time, he noted.

“That’s one of the things that maybe is a good thing in self-funded spaceflight: because it’s self-funded, you can do whatever you want,” Donovan said.

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