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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.