JAKARTA SpaceX, a company owned by Elon Musk, successfully launched four private astronauts on the Fram2 mission. This is the first human flight mission around Earth through polar orbit.
The mission is led by crypto entrepreneur Chun Wang, a Chinese-born investor in Malta known as the founder of the Bitcoin mining company. The name Fram2 itself was inspired by the Norwegian Fram, which played an important role in Arctic exploration in the early 20th century.
The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon capsule took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday evening March 31 at 21:47 EDT (Tuesday 01.47 GMT). The crew will spend 3 to 5 days in orbit, conducting 22 scientific experiments related to the impact of spaceflight and microgravity on the human body.
Prior to the launch, the four crew were escorted to the runway using Tesla's electric car in a motorcade escorted by police. In the middle of the trip, they had witnessed the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on an unrelated Starlink mission.
"We watched the rocket launch on its way to our own rocket launch," Wang wrote on Musk's X social media platform, accompanied by a Falcon 9 launch video.
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Fram2 is the sixth private astronaut mission run by SpaceX, further confirming the dominance of the company in the commercial spaceflight industry. Crew Dragon used in this mission is a capsule-shaped spacecraft developed with funds from NASA and is now routinely used in manned missions.
Currently, SpaceX is the only company that routinely flies manned capsules into orbit. Meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner capsule is still experiencing development constraints. At a cost of around 55 million US dollars (Rp910.8 billion) per seat, commercial spaceflight originally intended for wealthy tourists is now increasingly being used by countries that want to build their space experiences.
However, Fram2 is a purely private mission without government support. Apart from Wang, the other crew are Norwegian director Jannicke Mikkelsen, who is an expert in virtual reality cinematography, robotics researcher and polar scientist from Germany, Rabea Rogge, and Australian adventurer Eric Philips, known for his extreme ski expeditions in the polar region.
The mission is a new milestone in private space exploration, opening up new possibilities for future research and space travel.
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