In general, most manned missions to Earth orbit tend to follow a trajectory that takes the ships and their occupants around the waist of our planet. When it comes to civilian crews, that has always been the case. But that's about to change, and it will this year, when SpaceX launches a mission called Fram2.
Fram is a name you may know, if you're into exploratory adventures and all that. It's the name of the ship that carried Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, Oscar Wisting, and Roald Amundsen on their voyages to the Arctic and Antarctic in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The Fram2 mission was named in honor of that ship simply because it will carry people who have never been in space before into a polar orbit that will take them above the poles of our planet.
The mission was announced this week by SpaceX as its sixth commercial astronaut flight. A Falcon 9 rocket will be used to launch a Crew Dragon spacecraft from Florida later this year.
The all-civilian crew is led by a Maltese entrepreneur named Chun Wang. The commander of the vehicle is Norwegian Jannicke Mikkelsen, while the pilot of the ship will be Australian Eric Philips. The fourth crew member, German Rabea Rogge, will take on the role of mission specialist.
The flight is expected to last between three and five days, and it won't be a walk in the park. That's because Fram2 will carry these people into a polar orbit that will allow, for the first time, the polar regions to be studied from space with a human eye. And that means that several tasks will have to be completed.
The first aspect to consider is the analysis of the unusual light emissions, similar to the aurora borealis, which occur at altitudes between 400 and 500 km and consist of green fragments and mauve ribbons of continuous emissions.
On behalf of SpaceX, the crew will study the effects of spaceflight on the human body, including performing the first X-ray ever taken of a human in space.
As mentioned, Fram2 will be SpaceX’s sixth private mission with astronauts. To date, including five previous private flights and the transport of NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), Crew Dragon has flown with a total of 50 people on board no fewer than 13 times.
If you factor in cargo deliveries, the Dragon family of spacecraft has flown 46 times. That's by far the most space launches of any private space company, and it looks like things will only accelerate in the immediate future.
SpaceX is using all these flights to learn about the challenges of carrying people to Mars, which has always been the company’s ultimate goal.