SpaceX launches private astronaut crew in Fram2 polar-orbiting mission

Washington: Elon Musk's SpaceX on Monday launched a crew of four private astronauts led by a crypto entrepreneur on a mission to orbit Earth from pole to pole, a novel trajectory in which no humans have traveled before.

Maltese investor Chun Wang, a Chinese-born magnate who founded a bitcoin mining company, is the bankroller and commander of the SpaceX mission, named Fram2, a reference to the Norwegian "Fram" ship that pioneered Arctic exploration at the turn of the 20th century.

Wang and three associates launched aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule at 9:47 p.m. EDT on Monday (0147 GMT on Tuesday) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, setting off for a free-flying mission for three to five days, during which they will partake in 22 research experiments largely centered on how spaceflight and microgravity affect the human body.

The four crew members on Monday afternoon were driven to the launchpad in a caravan of Teslas - the electric cars of Musk's other company - winding through the roads of Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a police escort, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched overhead in an unrelated Starlink mission.

"We're gonna watch a rocket launch while on our way to a rocket launch," Wang wrote on X, the social media site owned by Musk, alongside a video of a Falcon 9 climbing the skies to space during their drive.

The mission, SpaceX's sixth private astronaut flight, is the company's latest novel effort that expands its dominance in the global human spaceflight arena. It comes as Musk's power as SpaceX CEO and the world's richest man soars as he works as a close adviser to US President Donald Trump, a role that has given him extraordinary influence for a businessman over an array of US policy matters.

Fram2 is the 16th crewed mission overall using the reusable Crew Dragon, a gumdrop-shaped spacecraft that SpaceX developed with NASA funding to provide the US space agency a ride for its astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

SpaceX and its Dragon craft have dominated the nascent market for private orbital spaceflight, an area in which a key source of demand originally came from a small field of wealthy tourists. Dragon is the world's only privately built capsule routinely flying missions in orbit, as Boeing's Starliner capsule is held up in development.

In recent years, with Dragon flights costing roughly $55 million per seat, the spaceflight market - involving companies such as Axiom Space that contract Crew Dragon missions - has fixated more on astronauts from governments willing to pay the sum mainly for national prestige and bolstering domestic spaceflight experience.

But the Fram2 crew is untethered from government backing. Wang's friends include Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, who specializes in virtual-reality cinematography; German robotics researcher and polar scientist Rabea Rogge, and Australian adventurer Eric Philips, who has taken up ambitious skiing expeditions in Earth's harsh polar regions.