SpaceX announces first human mission to ever fly over the planet’s poles

Enlarge / The crew of Fram2 from left to right: Eric Philips, Jannicke Mikkelsen, Chun Wang, and Rabea Rogge. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX will fly the first-ever human spaceflight over the Earth’s poles, possibly before the end of this year, the company announced Monday. The private Crew Dragon mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years.

The "Fram2" mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX's launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three-to-five day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

The four-person crew will fly, fittingly, aboard Crew Dragon Endurance, which is named after Ernest Shackleton's famous ship that was trapped in the Antarctic ice and eventually sunk there about a century ago. The spacecraft will be fitted with a cupola for both photography and filming.