A few hours ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft completed its Fram2 mission with a safe splashdown. Chun Wang, Rabea Rogge, Jannicke Mikkelsen, and Eric Philip were on board and completed this completely private space mission in the Pacific Ocean after spending just over three and a half days in orbit. Shortly after splashdown, SpaceX’s “MV Shannon” ship picked up the Resilience and its crew and transported them to the coast.
For SpaceX, the end of the Fram2 mission also marked the first time astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. So far, Crew Dragons have splashed down in the Atlantic, but the so-called trunk, the unpressurized section, which is ejected during re-entry into the atmosphere, occasionally landed on dry land, posing risks for the locals. Splashdown in the Pacific allows the unpressurized section to end up in the ocean as well, so future missions for NASA will also end this way.
Launched on April 1, Fram2 is a private mission set up by SpaceX that had four civilians as its protagonists, all of whom were on their first space mission. One of the novelties of this mission consisted in the attempt of the astronauts to exit the spacecraft without help, counting on the fact that the short duration of the flight hadn’t affected their muscle tone as much as happens in longer missions. The results were good since the framonauts, as the four astronauts were nicknamed, actually did it.
The Fram2 mission was the first with astronauts to have a polar orbit but it wasn’t really revolutionary. Having a crew of four civilians on their first space mission was, in some ways, a more important novelty since, generally, even in private missions, there’s a veteran astronaut.
The crew of the Fram2 mission showed that even a group of rookies can get by on a space trip. Actually, some of them had initial negative reactions, suffering from nausea caused by the microgravity condition that exists when the spacecraft reaches its orbit.
The crew members of the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft didn’t have training as extensive as the training astronauts from space agencies have. However, they have various technical skills that allowed them to conduct some experiments in orbit and take x-rays as part of the medical monitoring of their health during the Fram2 mission. In a polar orbit, astronauts are hit by a greater amount of radiation, so it’s more important than ever that they are monitored.
For SpaceX, this is another successful private mission. Other missions are already planned, starting with the much longer and more complex Ax-4, part of the program developed in collaboration with Axiom Space and NASA.
