SpaceX launches four commercial private citizens on the first manned polar orbital mission
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully launched its Resilience capsule carrying four private citizens on commercial manned mission, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.
The first stage completed its sixth mission, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. Resilience in turn is on its fourth flight, with the last three all dedicated to commercial flights for private citizens.
The crew is made up of four rookie space-flyers, mission commander Chun Wang (who paid for the flight), vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, vehicle pilot Rabea Rogge, and mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips. The plan is for them to stay in orbit from three to five days, circling the Earth in a polar orbit, the first time any humans have flown in space in such an orbit.
As always, the mission, dubbed Fram2 to honor Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram ship that explored the north pole region from 1893 to 1896, touts its many science experiments, but we should not fool ourselves. Its real goal is to provide Wang and his compatriots the thrill of flying in space.
That the flight is attracting relatively little press compared to previous private and NASA missions indicates how routine SpaceX is making its business. It is making space exploration profitable and no longer reliant on government funds. This is a big deal. Too bad most news outlets don’t realize it.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
36 SpaceX
16 China
5 Rocket Lab
4 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 36 to 28.
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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.
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Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully launched its Resilience capsule carrying four private citizens on commercial manned mission, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.
The first stage completed its sixth mission, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. Resilience in turn is on its fourth flight, with the last three all dedicated to commercial flights for private citizens.
The crew is made up of four rookie space-flyers, mission commander Chun Wang (who paid for the flight), vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, vehicle pilot Rabea Rogge, and mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips. The plan is for them to stay in orbit from three to five days, circling the Earth in a polar orbit, the first time any humans have flown in space in such an orbit.
As always, the mission, dubbed Fram2 to honor Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram ship that explored the north pole region from 1893 to 1896, touts its many science experiments, but we should not fool ourselves. Its real goal is to provide Wang and his compatriots the thrill of flying in space.
That the flight is attracting relatively little press compared to previous private and NASA missions indicates how routine SpaceX is making its business. It is making space exploration profitable and no longer reliant on government funds. This is a big deal. Too bad most news outlets don’t realize it.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
36 SpaceX
16 China
5 Rocket Lab
4 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 36 to 28.
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.
I’m afraid that the reason this mission isn’t attracting any mainstream press attention has little to do with it having become routine. I was watching the launch on my phone in line at the market, and the person behind me asked if that was a SpaceX Nazi rocket, and expressed hope that it would blow up. When I said that there were people on it, his response was “That’s fine. Musk wouldn’t care, but maybe it would destroy his company.”
I gave up trying to show him that it was in fact HE, not Musk, that was indifferent to human life after about a minute. There was no logic operating in his brain, it was pure hatred, and nothing at all I said meant anything other than to make it clear that I was a horrible neo-Nazi Musk and Trump supporter.
By my count, Crew Dragon has now taken 66 humans to orbit in 5 years. Not too shabby.
But this is just the beginning.
Don’t get it twisted Bob.
This media blackout is so the pundits don’t have to offer Musk ANY positive attention.
Kind of crazy the 180 that has happened with Musk and our society.
M Adams,
An accurate analysis of coverage decisions by legacy media. But legacy media also fired or retired their last space specialists decades ago. New Media, especially YouTubers and podcasters, pretty much own the space beat these days with the exception of a handful of legacy niche players such as Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine.
There certainly has been a 180 about Musk, as you say – two of them, in fact. The right, which now mostly loves the guy, used to dismiss him as part of the climate alarmist crowd because of Tesla. Now, they’re buying the stock and the cars as a form of counter-protest support.
The left, who formerly embraced Musk, started peeling away over his defiance of the California Covid Reich and the UAW’s conspicuous failure to cozen any significant number of Tesla employees into supporting its goverment-licensed protection racket and the even more off-putting IAMAW suffering similar reverses at SpaceX. Buying Twitter, restoring free speech to the Web then throwing in with Trump were just icing on the cake. Mr. Eastman’s encounter in a supermarket checkout line is an index of the current cultishness and impotent rage that characterizes what remains of the woke left.
History seems likely to record that the woke totalitarian American left’s ultimately fatal act of hubris was to go after Elon Musk. But they forced him to take a good look at what it really was and he, unsurprisingly, recoiled from the ugly reality under all the boilerplate rhetoric about compassion and concern for the downtrodden that he had been content to take at face value in the days before he gave much serious thought to politics. To quote the late Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the left “have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” Once he understood that the struggle was actually existential, for the country as a whole even more than merely for himself, Musk went all-in.
DOGE is doing more substantial and consequential damage to the left than any other force in American history by systematically cutting off its largest source of money. And rumor has it that Musk intends other assaults on remaining leftist fastnesses. One of his core competencies has always been the ability to assemble high-performance organizations and run them effectively. Musk is said to be in the early stages of ginning up just such an organization aimed at taking out the corrupt and power-abusive in the political class – worst actors first – by funding suitable challengers in both primary and general elections. Over time, this could have a seriously tonic effect on the politics of the nation if it induces the criminally-inclined to eschew politics as too personally risky. We shall see, but I will confess to being optimistic.
ZimmerBob,
You need to bump up your SpaceX launch count by one. SpaceX launched a Starlink mission from SLC-40 a few hours earlier on the 31st than the Fram2 launch from LC-39A. The webcast of the Starlink launch went wonky at about T-2:35 and none of it could be seen on X. That may account for the oversight.
Dick Eagleson: Thank you. I will correct the count.
I however will ask you again to stop with the “ZimmermBob.” I have a sense of humor, but in the end wonder why you do this, even though I asked you directly in an email to stop. It suggests a level of disrespect that is unnecessary. You don’t do it with anyone else.
Most of y’all are have been around this block longer than me. But I think it is the case that science coverage in major media has *always* been pretty bad; the Jules Bergmans we remember tend to obscure that. I recall reading that Richard Feynman was so fed up with inane questions reporters peppered him with after he won his Nobel Prize in 1965, that he lashed out at one asking him to explain what he’d done to win the prize in terms an “average person” could understand: “Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel prize.”
But when the internet finally hit, newsroom headcount started getting hammered everywhere, and that only made a bad situation worse. (I worked for a major market newspaper for a spell in the 00’s — when I left, there were 3,000 employees. Checking this morning, I see that the paper has…307.) There wasn’t much left to immolate when the Millennial Maoists finally took over.
I might make a modest case for Kenneth Chang of the New York Times as an exception. Certainly he’s liberal, and institutionally coded — he has published no story on Fram2, or at least his editors have not allowed it — but he generally does solid and accurate coverage of space science stories. I think it helps that he has a masters in physics, which is a rare thing in a newsroom.
M Adams,
Oh, I think that’s part of it, no question.
But I used the term “institutionally coded” to Mr Eagleson just now, and I think it applies here. I think it’s hard for legacy media to know what to do with a space or science story if the protagonist is not a government actor or at least a government adjacent actor. They don’t have a box for it, or at least not a respectable box. Never mind how much pre-WW2 science and voyages of exploration were privately funded — all that is way down the memory hole.
Richard M wrote, “I think it’s hard for legacy media to know what to do with a space or science story if the protagonist is not a government actor or at least a government adjacent actor. They don’t have a box for it, or at least not a respectable box.”
In other words, they don’t report news, they report their “narratives”, usually political and leaning today very very far left. Facts that don’t fit those narratives thus must be ignored or twisted wildly to meet their expectations, no matter how wrong it makes the reporting.
Watched the replay. Always enjoy Mr. Insprucker.
Mr. Zimmerman,
I regret that you thought I was mocking you in any way with my little transform of your name. It was meant as nothing of the sort. It was, in fact, inspired by the affectionate nickname bestowed on the late sci-fi author Robert Silverberg by his fans – SilverBob. But I will cease and desist.
I didn’t see your e-mail. I don’t use my account much anymore except for two-factor verification of logins. Despite ever-losing efforts to combat same, I get so much spam that it quickly pushes legit e-mails into the stygian depths of my inbox. Yours is probably not the only missive to have suffered such a fate.
Dick Eagleson: Apology accepted. I was not strongly bothered, but found your use of this odd considering you did it with no one else. Once or twice was fun. Every time began to grate. It was like telling a joke over and over again when no one was laughing.
Just a minor nit-picky correction… Unless Wikipedia is sorely in need of updating, SF writer Robert Silverberg is still with us at the age of 90.
Yo Dwight! Long time, man. I hope all is well. Nice to see you are still around as well. :) I no longer have any interest in comics (having sold most for lots a money six years ago).
Dwight R Decker,
Well that’s embarrassing! I had this vague notion I had read of SilverBob’s passing a few years back and didn’t check before posting. Given that more than a few of his contemporaries have passed in recent years I was probably recalling reading of one of them. Mea culpa.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “The left, who formerly embraced Musk, started peeling away over his defiance of the California Covid Reich …
It was clear that Musk was not long for the Democrat Party once he responded “message received” to one of California’s Sacramento politicians. At that point, he certainly was leaving California, but we could see that the Democrats had turned on him, too.
______________
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “As always, the mission, dubbed Fram2 to honor Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram ship that explored the north pole region from 1893 to 1896, touts its many science experiments, but we should not fool ourselves. Its real goal is to provide Wang and his compatriots the thrill of flying in space.”
I hadn’t been aware of any science on this trip, but then I had tuned into the webcast late, just in time to hear the two SpaceX employees describe their experiences during their trip aboard a Dragon. Either way, this extends the Dragon’s record of always having flown people who performed experiments on each of its flights. Enjoying the ride is just part of the experience.
During my very first paid job, a science intern from a college co-op program wrote a proposal to do free-fall experiments aboard a NASA airplane (a business jet, not the famous Vomit Comet). His experiment was approved. We didn’t fool ourselves. His real goal was to experience the thrill of flying in free-fall, but he got a paper out of it, too.
The goal may be to fly in space, but isn’t that why NASA’s astronauts apply for their jobs, too?
You can’t tell me that Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton weren’t motivated by thrills and glory, too.