Private polar space trip set to return to Earth today

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Apr 4, 2025

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SpaceX is set to return to Earth today the four crew of the private polar Fram2 mission that launched from Kennedy Space Center on Monday night.

The Crew Dragon Resilience is targeting splashdown off the California coast at 12:19 p.m. EDT (9:19 a.m. PDT) after spending more than 3 1/2 days circling the planet on the first human spaceflight on a polar orbit.

Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur Chun Wang, now of Malta, paid an undisclosed price for the jaunt to space getting a unique view of some of the same places in the Arctic and Antarctica to which he had trekked by land.

He brought along friends and fellow adventurers Eric Philips of Australia, Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway and Rabea Rogge of Germany.

The California landing is a first for a SpaceX Crew Dragon, although cargo versions of the spacecraft had previously splashed down off the Pacific Coast before SpaceX moved operations to Florida.

The company made the decision last year, though, to switch back to the Pacific. The move was made for safety reasons after several incidents were reported of debris found on land that were determined to be remnants of the propulsion module that detaches from Dragon before splashdown.

While the Fram2 mission was a private endeavor, the crew performed 22 research experiments during the trip including taking the first X-ray in space.

Their landing will also feature the four exiting the spacecraft without any assistance if all goes to plan.

This marks the completion of Resilience’s fourth trip to space after having debuted on the Crew-1 mission the International Space Station in 2020 followed by the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions paid for by billionaire and likely next NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

It’s the only Crew Dragon to be outfitted with something other than a forward-facing docking hatch, since it’s last three flights including this one had not required meeting up with the space station.

Instead, on both Inspiration4 and Fram2, SpaceX installed a cupola window to allow for 360-degree views while on orbit. On Polaris Dawn, that was switched out for the Skywalker apparatus that let Isaacman perform the first commercial spacewalk.

SpaceX has flown 66 people in space aboard its fleet of four Crew Dragons on 17 missions since 2020. A fifth Dragon is under construction.

The next trip is slated to be the private Axiom Space Ax-4 mission taking a short trip to the space station with liftoff no earlier than May. After that, SpaceX has the Commercial Crew Program rotational crew mission Crew-11 targeting mid-July to fly up and relieve the Crew-10 mission that arrived to the station last month.

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