— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 3, 2025 SpaceX’s Fram2 mission launched on Monday, March 31, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The private mission sent a crew of amateur astronauts where no other human has flown before, orbiting Earth from above the planet’s polar regions on an unprecedented journey. Chun Wang, a crypto billionaire who founded the Bitcoin mining companies f2pool and stakefish, led the crew as mission commander. The remaining crew members are Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian cinematographer; Eric Philips, an Australian polar adventurer; and Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher. All four crew members had never been to space prior to this mission, which is reportedly being funded by Wang. In a series of updates from space, the crew described feeling motion sickness in orbit and having unfortunate bouts of vomiting in the spacecraft. The astronauts packed 22 research payloads to orbit, which are designed to improve our understanding of human health in space and prepare for long-duration missions. As part of the research, the crew took the first-ever X-ray in space, did a brain mapping EEG experiment and examined how fluid shifts in space affect the accuracy of glucose monitors for diabetics. The crew members also conducted orbital tests for SpaceX’s Starlink network, which they used to contact their families on Earth, while robotics researcher Rogge used an onboard amateur radio, called Fram2Ham, to contact Berlin. During the mission, the Dragon spacecraft flew over the planet’s polar regions at an altitude of around 265 to 280 miles (425 to 450 kilometers), and traveled in a polar orbit at an inclination of about 60 to 90 degrees to the equator. The same spacecraft, named the Dragon Resilience, is the one that carried the Polaris Dawn mission, which pulled off the first commercial spacewalk in history just last year.