Next SpaceX commercial manned flight set to launch on March 31, 2025
The next SpaceX manned commercial spaceflight, dubbed Fram2, is now targeting a 9:47 pm (Eastern) launch on March 31, 2025 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four private astronauts on their first flight, using SpaceX’s Resilience manned capsule on its fourth flight.
The crew consists of Malta resident Chun Wang, Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, Pilot Rabea Rogge and Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Eric Philips. All four of them will fly to space for the first time on this mission that is being funded by Wang for an undisclosed amount.
I have embedded the Space Affairs live stream below. This will be the third straight private commercial flight for Resilience. Since its first flight for NASA to ISS in 2020, it has flown two missions paid for by Jared Isaacman, with the second mission including the first spacewalk by a private citizen.
This mission will break new exploration ground, as it will be the first manned mission to fly a polar orbit taking humans above both the north and south poles. All other human missions, by the U.S., Russia, and China, have always flown a range of orbits over the Earth’s equatorial regions. Because of this orbit, Wang named the mission Fram2 in honor of Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram ship that explored the north pole region and its icecap from 1893 to 1896.
As always, it is important in watching this launch to remember that there is no government employee involved anywhere. This mission is entirely private, run by a private company for profit, and flown by a customer who had the cash to pay for it.
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The next SpaceX manned commercial spaceflight, dubbed Fram2, is now targeting a 9:47 pm (Eastern) launch on March 31, 2025 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four private astronauts on their first flight, using SpaceX’s Resilience manned capsule on its fourth flight.
The crew consists of Malta resident Chun Wang, Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, Pilot Rabea Rogge and Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Eric Philips. All four of them will fly to space for the first time on this mission that is being funded by Wang for an undisclosed amount.
I have embedded the Space Affairs live stream below. This will be the third straight private commercial flight for Resilience. Since its first flight for NASA to ISS in 2020, it has flown two missions paid for by Jared Isaacman, with the second mission including the first spacewalk by a private citizen.
This mission will break new exploration ground, as it will be the first manned mission to fly a polar orbit taking humans above both the north and south poles. All other human missions, by the U.S., Russia, and China, have always flown a range of orbits over the Earth’s equatorial regions. Because of this orbit, Wang named the mission Fram2 in honor of Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram ship that explored the north pole region and its icecap from 1893 to 1896.
As always, it is important in watching this launch to remember that there is no government employee involved anywhere. This mission is entirely private, run by a private company for profit, and flown by a customer who had the cash to pay for it.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Interestingly, too, none of the Fram2 crew are Americans. (They are all fluent English speakers, though.)
With the mainstreaming of private orbital missions, and NASA’s troubles with it’s launch hardware, I’m reminded of some wag commenting on Felix Baumgartner’s jump that Red Bull had a better manned space program than NASA. At the time, balloon was the only home-grown option NASA had for getting people off the ground.
“Malta resident Chun Wang”
Huh? That’s like “Sven Johnson’s Chinese Laundry”
Oh, now it makes sense:
“Wang became a Maltese citizen in August 2023, purchasing citizenship through the controversial golden visa scheme five years after his first trip to Malta in 2018.”
https://timesofmalta.com/article/meet-chun-wang-first-maltese-citizen-space.1106102
Will be interesting to see how much media coverage there is for this flight, since NASA has no dog-and-pony in this show. No American A-naut either. Bon voyage.
“Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram ship that explored the north pole region and its icecap from 1893 to 1896.”
You can see the Fram in Oslo, and also the Viking Ship Museum, both well worth it.
Robert – small correction. The Arctic doesn’t have an “Ice Cap”, as those form over land (like Ellesmere Is & to an extent, Greenland, which is really an archipelago). The Arctic Ocean, depending on the season, is frozen sea water, an “Ice Pack”, made up of “Multiyear ice” (that which survives the Summer) & “First Year Ice” (the Summer open water that freezes over in the Winter).
Cheers.
To their credit, the Fram2 team has been doing their share of social media outreach of late. But in the actual media realm, it seems like a mission almost in stealth mode. Even in my curated feeds, which lean heavy on space developments, I’ve been surprised how little coverage there has been.
Perhaps we really are at the point where a private spaceflight (even to an unprecedented polar orbit) is just a ho-hum thing. I mean, I can’t rule out that some legacy media might be going out of their way to avoid giving SpaceX any positive headlines; but there’s surprising little about it popping up even on X, the platform Elon owns. Even Elon himself has only retweeted a couple SpaceX posts about the mission over the past week…and given the massive volume of politics-related posts he’s done, they just get lost in the shuffle.