A bitcoin investor who bought a SpaceX flight for himself and three polar explorers blasted off on Monday night on the first rocket ride to carry people over the North and South poles.
Wang Chun (王春), a Chinese-born entrepreneur, hurtled into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX’s Falcon rocket steered southward over the Atlantic, putting the space tourists on a path never flown before in 64 years of human spaceflight.
Wang would not say how much he paid Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the three-and-a-half-day ultimate polar adventure.
Photo: Reuters
The first leg of their flight — from Florida to the South Pole — took barely a half-hour. From the targeted altitude of about 440km, their fully automated capsule would circle the globe in about one-and-a-half hours, including 46 minutes to fly from pole to pole.
“Enjoy the views of the poles. Send us some pictures,” SpaceX Launch Control radioed once the capsule reached orbit.
Wang has already visited the polar regions in person and wants to view them from space.
The trip is also about “pushing boundaries, sharing knowledge,” he said ahead of the flight.
Now a citizen of Malta, he took along three guests: Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian polar guide Eric Philips.
Mikkelsen, the first Norwegian bound for space, has flown over the poles before, but at a much lower altitude. She was part of the 2019 record-breaking mission that circumnavigated the world via the poles in a Gulfstream jet to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing.
The crew plans two dozen experiments — including taking the first human X-rays in space — and brought along more cameras than usual to document their journey called Fram2 after the Norwegian polar research ship from more than a century ago.
Until now, no space traveler had ventured beyond 65 degrees north and south latitude, just shy of the Arctic and Antarctic circles. The first woman in space, the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova, set that mark in 1963. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and other pioneering cosmonauts came almost as close, as did NASA shuttle astronauts in 1990.
A polar orbit is ideal for climate and Earth-mapping satellites as well as spy satellites. That is because a spacecraft can observe the entire world each day, circling Earth from pole to pole as it rotates below.
Geir Klover, director of the Fram Museum in Oslo, where the original polar ship is on display, hopes the trip will draw more attention to climate change and the melting polar caps.
He lent the crew a tiny piece of the ship’s wooden deck that bears the signature of Oscar Wisting, who with Roald Amundsen in the early 1900s became the first to reach both poles.
Wang pitched the idea of a polar flight to SpaceX in 2023, two years after US tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman made the first of two chartered flights with Musk’s company. Isaacman is now in the running for NASA’s top job.
SpaceX’s Kiko Dontchev said late last week that the company is continually refining its training so “normal people” without traditional aerospace backgrounds can “hop in a capsule ... and be calm about it.”
Wang and his crew view the polar flight like camping in the wild and embrace the challenge.
“Spaceflight is becoming increasingly routine and, honestly, I’m happy to see that,” Wang wrote on X last week.
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
SEVEN-MINUTE HEIST: The masked thieves stole nine pieces of 19th-century jewelry, including a crown, which they dropped and damaged as they made their escape The hunt was on yesterday for the band of thieves who stole eight priceless royal pieces of jewelry from the Louvre Museum in the heart of Paris in broad daylight. Officials said a team of 60 investigators was working on the theory that the raid was planned and executed by an organized crime group. The heist reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums, with French Minister of Justice yesterday admitting to security flaws in protecting the Louvre. “What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of
RSS