WASHINGTON — A Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the California coast April 4, wrapping up a three-and-a-half-day private astronaut mission that was the first crewed flight to orbit the Earth’s poles.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft Resilience splashed down off the coast from Oceanside, California, at 12:19 p.m. Eastern. The four persons on board the spacecraft exited the spacecraft about 45 minutes later, once the spacecraft was brought on board a recovery ship.
This was the first splashdown for a Crew Dragon spacecraft in the Pacific. SpaceX announced last year it would move reentries from near the Florida coast to the California coast to better control the reentry of the Dragon’s trunk section, ensuring it reenters over the ocean. SpaceX had previously allowed the trunk to perform uncontrolled reentries, and in several cases debris from the trunk survived reentry and fell on land.
The splashdown marked the end of the Fram2 private astronaut mission, which launched late March 31 from the Kennedy Space Center. The mission was bankrolled by Chun Wang, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who said he had a “lifelong curiosity” about the polar regions that led him to fly this mission, the first crewed spacecraft to go over the poles.
Wang served as mission commander, with Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian cinematographer, serving as vehicle commander of the Dragon spacecraft. Rabea Rogge, a robotics researcher from Germany, was the mission pilot, and Eric Philips, a professional polar explorer from Australia, was the mission specialist and medical officer.
Wang shared some insights from the mission on social media. “The ride to orbit was much smoother than I had anticipated,” he said in one post after a day in orbit. He acknowledged, though, that the “first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable” as the crew dealt with space sickness, whose symptoms subsided after the crew slept.
The crew conducted 22 experiments while in orbit, ranging from the first medical X-rays taken in orbit to tests of a device to enable crews to exercise within the limited space inside the spacecraft. All those experiments were completed successfully, said Marissa Rosenberg, senior medical research engineer at SpaceX, on the splashdown webcast.
That research continued after splashdown. The four crew members exited the spacecraft with little or no help from the recovery team on the ship. Rosenberg said before the launch that was intended to get experience for how crews on future missions to the moon and Mars will be able to leave their spacecraft when there are no recovery teams to assist.
The crew also took advantage of their unique orbit to view the polar regions. Wang, in one post, almost sounded disappointed with his views of Antarctica. “Unlike previously anticipated, from 460 km above, it is only pure white, no human activity is visible,” he wrote.
He had a different impression, though, of seeing the Arctic islands of Svalbard, which are too far north to be seen on missions to the International Space Station. “I often say Fram2 is a Svalbard mission,” he wrote, noting that crew met on Svalbard and that he planned the mission while living there. “From this perspective, the mission has perfectly achieved its goal.”
