Fram2 crew discuss first human mission to orbit Earth’s poles

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The first four humans to orbit Earth’s poles are sharing their experiences from their historic mission. In a discussion with NSF, the crew of Fram2 provided insight into their groundbreaking mission and what it’s like to view Earth from polar orbit.

On March 31, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the Crew Dragon Resilience on top. Inside the capsule was Mission Commander Chun Wang, Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, Pilot Rabea Rogge, and Medical Officer and Mission Specialist Eric Philips. All four of the international crew members were making their first flight to space.

The launch, for the first time in history, sent humans into an orbit inclined 90 degrees, orbiting the poles as opposed to the equator. Wang, a cryptocurrency investor, self-funded the mission.

All four crew members have a history of completing expeditions to both of Earth’s poles on Earth.

“People say Earth is a blue marble, a blue planet, but to us in polar orbit it’s more like a frozen planet,” Wang said. “So it gives you a feeling of not the Earth but another planet, an icy planet, such as Jupiter or Saturn[‘s moons].”

Compared to typical equatorial or ~50-degree inclination orbits, the crew members had a very different experience when it comes to viewing humanity from a higher perspective.

“I was expecting to see a lot more of the Earth, the brown Earth within the polar regions,” Philips noted. “When you’re there, you do see a lot of that in Svalbard and Greenland. The perimeter of Greenland, for example, there’s a lot of exposed Earth there, but when we looked at it from above, it was completely white. So I think this is one of the most stark contrasts between the images that we see online of these various polar locations and what we experienced.”

When it came to Earth observations, one of the most difficult parts, according to the crew, was figuring out your orientation. When asked about the difference between seeing these polar regions from space as opposed to using a tool like Google Earth, Mikkelsen remembered how it took her a moment to realize she was looking at her home in Svalbard.

“It’s like my home island and archipelago looks a little different to the world map, and I at first was like, ‘is that Svalbard? Is this where I live?’” Mikkelsen said. “It took a few seconds before we identified it, because it’s in the high Arctic and it’s connected to ice to the North Pole.”

She believes it all had to do with perspective.

“We always see images of it oriented north-south,” Mikkelsen observed. “But we’re up there, and depending on how we are positioned in the cupola, we’re seeing it upside down, left, right, whatever.”

Speaking on perspective, the crew of four noted how difficult it was to describe where they were in relation to their environment. The crew points out that if we want to continue onwards into space, we will need a whole new “Earth language.”

“We don’t have the vocabulary to express 3D space, and a lot of…sayings that we say on Earth just didn’t apply to our life in space and we laughed at how non-applicable it was,” Mikkelsen said.

Understanding positioning in 3D space was one of dozens of experiments selected for this flight. In particular, this experiment was an effort to reduce the effects of space adaptation sickness. All four crewmembers admitted to experiencing some form of space sickness during their three and a half day flight.

“I think a way of overcoming the space motion sickness is to position yourself in an orientation that is familiar to you,” Philips said. “And we all kind of tried that, and I think it worked to some level.”

He noted that since they trained in regular gravity with the expectation of instruments being up relative to our normal Earth environment, once they positioned themselves in a similar direction in space, that eased the disorientation.

The Fram2 crew takes a crew photo from orbit. (Credit: SpaceX)

Another one of the mission’s key experiments was studying the poles and the aurora.

“What we did see was the auroral oval and the bulging aurora with our elastic magnetic field stretched out from planet Earth, which was pretty breathtaking,” Mikkelsen said. “And we did capture exactly what we were looking for, which were the ghost auroras, the continuums, the sort of like white expanding light in the aurora that’s 3,000 degrees Celsius, and also the fragments of the lit up signals of the upper Earth, turbulence, these sort of like wavelengths that go perpendicular to the aurora and the magnetic field.”

As spectacular as the view was from space, Wang noted that the best view of the auroras was actually from the ground.

“The auroras are beautiful from the capsule, but I think all Earthlings have the best perspective of auroras from the surface,” Wang observed. “We’ve all seen them, they’re incredibly special, so don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything. It’s fabulous up there, but you get the best views of auroras from having your feet planted on planet Earth.”

Crew Dragon Resilience splashes down in the Pacific Ocean at the conclusion of the Fram2 mission. (Credit: SpaceX)

One additional experiment involved the reentry and landing process. This mission marked the first splashdown of a Crew Dragon capsule in the Pacific Ocean. This is expected to become a regular occurrence as SpaceX works on moving all capsule recovery procedures to the West Coast.

The goal of the experiment was to egress from the vehicle independently, something traditionally done with lots of assistance from crews on the recovery vessel. However, the crew quickly realized just how difficult it could be as they began reentering Earth’s atmosphere on April 4, 2025.

“It was quite significant when we are starting to de-orbit and I was lifting my hands to do the push to talk and I was like, oh, this feels like 1G,” Mikkelsen remembered. “So, I looked up at…the accelerometer to check our Gs. We were at 0.2. I was like, oh man, we’re in for a ride.”

Once the crew capsule was safed and lifted onto the recovery ship, the weight of gravity was truly felt.

“I think our expectations were like, oh yeah, it’s going to be a little bit harder, but personally, I wasn’t prepared for how heavy your body feels and how heavy the cargo felt,” Rogge said. “It was like 15 kilograms, I think, that we lifted out of it. And how unsteady you were on your legs, because suddenly your body is like, oh yeah, there are legs and you should use them.”

While the experiment was a success, there was one thing Mikkelsen was upset with.

“I was so disappointed in my own body after only three and a half days,” Mikkelsen noted. “My body had completely forgotten what it’s known its whole life and that’s gravity, and it’s been made and developed to sustain 1G through evolution.”

This was the second mission to test a Starlink plug-in laser experiment known as a “Plaser.” The crew noted the connection, while not available through the whole flight, was extremely steady and fast.

“That’s how you see a 15-minute 1080p video getting posted on X,” Wang said, who regularly posted updates from his iPhone in orbit. “So the links are pretty fast and the latency is low.”

“It’s higher speeds than our support team had on Earth,” Mikkelsen added.

The crew regularly engaged in video calls to Earth with multiple people on the call with no issues.

The four-person team says they would absolutely fly into space again, in particular once SpaceX’s Starship vehicle is flying regularly. In the meantime, we can expect more 8K imagery recorded during the flight to be released in the near future.

(Lead image: Crew Dragon Resilience and its cupola imaged flying over one of Earth’s polar regions. Credit: SpaceX)

The post Fram2 crew discuss first human mission to orbit Earth’s poles appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.



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