Simply over a month for the reason that return of the primary astronauts to orbit Earth’s poles, SpaceX has launched a four-hour video highlighting what that appeared like from house.
SpaceX launched the Fram2 mission on March 31, sending the mission’s financier and crew right into a polar orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, marking a milestone in human spaceflight. The mission lasted about 3.5 days, throughout which the Fram2 crew performed a handful of microgravity experiments and Earth observations.
Fram2 was funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who served as mission commander. Chun was joined by fellow polar explorers Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway, Rabea Rogge, from Germany, and Australian Eric Philips. The quartet returned to Earth on April 4, splashing down safely in the Pacific ocean on the finish of their mission. Now, as video from their spaceflight has been processed and arranged, SpaceX has launched among the footage of Dragon in orbit.
SpaceX posted the four-hour video on its X account over the weekend, highlighting a few of Dragon’s finest views because the Fram2 crew gazed in awe from the spacecraft’s domed window.
Fram2’s orbit flew Dragon on a north-to-south trajectory in low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 271 miles (437 kilometers). From their novel perspective, the “Framonauts” have been in a position to witness Earth’s poles like no astronauts ever have earlier than, and spent their mission documenting the view to share with the world.
Throughout their time in house, the Fram2 crew performed a complete of twenty-two science experiments, together with one which captured the first X-ray of a human body in space. One other studied how mushrooms develop in a microgravity atmosphere.
Watch the prolonged, ~4-hour reduce with further views from the Dragon spacecraft flying over Earth’s polar areas in the course of the Fram2 mission pic.twitter.com/WjK3ismJfKMay 4, 2025
Fram2’s return additionally allowed for some further post-flight experiments and observations specializing in the crew’s restoration, readjustment to Earth’s gravity and the consequences of spaceflight on the human physique, a few of which passed off at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The mission was SpaceX’s seventeenth with astronauts, and its first crewed mission SpaceX has recovered within the Pacific Ocean. West Coast recoveries would be the norm shifting ahead, nevertheless, as SpaceX is shifting Dragon landings away from Florida to keep away from attainable cases of Dragon’s trunk particles surviving atmospheric reentry and falling in a populated areas.
