Four space tourists return to Earth after record-breaking orbit in a SpaceX flight

Space agencies have endeavored to conduct massive missions and send people to explore the vastness of space. Space tourism, becoming an accessible means of travel and leisure, is a cherished dream. In a recent step, a private SpaceX flight went on an exciting journey around the Earth’s poles. The four space tourists returned to Earth safely on Friday, April 4, 2025, which was live-streamed by SpaceX. This was the first mission with humans onboard that conducted a polar orbit, circling around both the North and South poles, and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

A successful journey was celebrated by Chun Wang, a cryptocurrency billionaire, who chartered the private SpaceX flight, Fram2. He was accompanied by three others who splashed down on the coast of California in the Pacific Ocean. This mission took off on Monday, 31 March 2025, and marked the first splashdown of a crew in the Pacific in 50 years. The last flight descent in the Pacific was the return of three NASA astronauts assigned to the 1975 Apollo - Soyuz mission, as per BBC. The crew flew directly above the poles every 40 minutes at a height of 270 miles in the air.

This was the latest success of SpaceX’s commercial human spaceflight dream as the people were free-flying in orbit for roughly a week. The Dragon capsule was constructed with a domed window that gave a 360-degree view of the polar region. Mr Wang invited three of his associates: Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian polar guide Eric Philips, to join him on his flight. They were also tasked with taking pictures of the auroras from the orbit and noting their experience with motion sickness.

“The first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable. Space motion sickness hit all of us — we felt nauseous and ended up vomiting a couple of times,” Wang stated in his post on X. “It felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea. You could still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even a small sip of water could upset your stomach and trigger vomiting,” he added, along with the assurance that they got better by the second morning.

The private astronauts shared various images and videos and conducted 22 research experiments during the mission, as per Sky News. They even exited the capsule upon return, without assistance, to show how people could easily walk off a spacecraft onto a spatial object. This was part of an “egress experiment.” Antarctica seemed white and uninhabited to the crew, and they also spotted a group of Norwegian islands near the North Pole called Svalbard. Wang highlighted the unique vantage point they had and said that the mission “perfectly achieved its goal.”

A human spacecraft of SpaceX never splashed down off the coast of California but always landed in Florida. However, this time, the recovery operations were shifted to the West Coast for safety purposes. The capsule had to eject an attachment at its base as it reentered the atmosphere, called the trunk. Landing in the Pacific ensured that the equipment was safely disposed of in the ocean, avoiding the risk of it falling on land. This was the sixth fully private space mission by SpaceX, and the Dragon capsule was the only privately built craft to conduct routine space missions.