Spacex launches first mission with crew to polar orbit

Spacex launched on Monday (31) a space mission to orbit above the north and southern poles of Earth-something that has never been done. The mission is paid and the spacecraft team Crew Dragon took a cryptocurrency billionaire and three guests on the space of several days that occurs in space.

The mission, called Fram2, was launched from Spacex facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States. The takeoff occurred around 9:46 pm at the United States.

Leading the Mission is Chun Wang, resident of Malta, who made his fortune by managing Bitcoin mining operations and paid Spacex an amount of money for the not released trip.

Along with him is a trio of other polar exploration enthusiasts: Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, German -based robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian adventurer Eric Philips.

After taking off from Florida, Spacex’s Falcon 9 rocket had to fly south – tracing a path that no manned space mission ever traveled.

The pre-planted flight to FRAM2 should also take the Cuba Capsule on Cuba and Panama while the rocket propelled the spacecraft towards the orbit.

A few minutes after takeoff, Falcon 9 rocket first stage propeller, which provides the initial explosion of takeoff power, separated from the second stage of the rocket and returned to land in a maritime ferry.

The top of the rocket then called its own engine and began to boost the crew at more than 28 thousand km/h, placing the four astronauts in a trajectory to travel directly over the Earth’s poles.

The unusual trajectory was chosen to honor the group’s interest in polar exploration.

All four crew members are traveling to space for the first time. “We have a non-traditional mission, Mikkelsen said last Friday (28).“ We are not your typical NASA astronauts… We left ‘nothing’ and became certified astronauts to fly. ”

An unconventional space flight trajectory

Launching a group of people – or satellites – in an orbital trajectory surrounding the north and south poles is not an easy task.

And it is rarely done from Florida: Launching sites on the east coast are ideal for missions that travel directly to the east, because the rotation of the earth can give rockets flying in this direction a significant natural impulse. But FRAM2 had to be launched south.

Such a trajectory requires that the rocket spends enormous amounts of energy – resulting in “a significant performance loss for this launch vehicle in terms of how much mass it can put in orbit,” as Dr. Crag Kluever, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri, explained during a telephone interview last week.

This does not matter – since the Falcon 9 rocket had enough energy to put the FRAM2 spacecraft in the intended orbit. But that raises the question: Why exactly this orbit?

Although crew members are estimated to perform 22 research and science experiments during their days in space most involve the health evaluation of the crew and could be performed regardless of its flight trajectory .

Therefore, putting the FRAM2 in polar orbit may have more to do with the planning a different mission – instead of an ideally suitable for science.

“This is a private mission. You need something to say it is different and exciting about it,” said Dr. Christopher Combs – the Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design Associated Research Rector of the University of Texas in San Antonio.

“It’s interesting that no one has ever done a real polar orbit,” added Combs, “and it’s great that we have commercial suppliers who are making space travel increasingly routine.”

In his opinion, Combs added, flying a manned space mission around the poles is “just above a trick, but not exactly an innovative milestone.”

Spacex has already launched satellites in Florida’s polar orbit before using a zigzag maneuver that required Spacex Falcon 9 rocket to fly to the East over the Atlantic Ocean before turning south sharply.

Get to know the crew of FRAM2, Spacex’s manned mission to orbit the poles of the earth

It is unclear how much Wang paid Spacex for this mission. Two cryptocurrency experts with whom CNN contacted this report said Wang tends to maintain a more discreet profile than most people in the Blockchain investment community and little is known about it.

Wang is the co -founder of F2Pool, an organization that uses a Bitcoin mineral computer network, which involves solving complex mathematical problems.

F2Pool is prominent, accounting for about 11% of the total bitcoin hashrate – or the total computational power used to mine coins.

Wang’s net equity is ostensibly in billions, although it is not possible to estimate an exact value.

Leaving aside Blockchain developments, during the event only in audio held on Spacex CEO X platform, Elon Musk, on Friday (28), it was evident that Wang and his crew companions are polar enthusiasts.

Mikkelsen, for example, is a neighbor of Wang in Svalbard, a group of remote Norwegian islands near the North Pole, and a dedicated adventurer. As a cameraman and director, she focused her work on science fiction and documentary projects and technology development to shoot in hostile and remote environments, according to her site. She plans to make a movie about this mission.

Rogge is a doctorate candidate researching navigation, guidance and control for automated vehicles that cross adverse conditions, according to a page of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is also the first German woman to fly to orbit.

Philips is a full-time explorer and guide who has made about 30 excursions to the Polar Regions of Earth since 1992, according to his website and comments he made last Friday (28). He described the environment as “incredibly hostile.”

“And what a perfect comparison with us within Dragon while we orbiting the north and south poles for three to five days,” Philips added. “It’s the same kind of blizzard experience. We have four people locked inside … An incredibly severe environment.”

The group began training for the FRAM2 mission last year, and preparations included isolation in “hostile environments” in Alaska, as well as training at Spacex headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Wang recently said that he was not nervous or anxious about the next mission, according to a publication that shared the social media platform X.

“Now, everything that needed to be done has been done. From now on, just follow the procedures. The animation doesn’t belong to me anymore,” said Wang.

Through the Spacex profile in X you can also see the first images recorded by the mission.

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This content was originally published in Spacex launches first mission with crew to polar orbit on the CNN Brazil website.



Source: CNN Brasil

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