A Bitcoin investor and three polar explorers blasted off on Monday in the first rocket ride over the North and South Poles.
Chun Wang, a Chinese-born entrepreneur, flew southward in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket over the Atlantic on a path never flown before.
The first leg of the flight, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the South Pole took half an hour and would circle the globe in roughly 90 minutes.
"Enjoy the views of the poles. Send us some pictures," SpaceX Launch Control radioed once the capsule reached orbit.
'Pushing boundaries'
Wang said he's been counting up his flights since his first one in 2002, flying on planes, helicopters, and hot air balloons in his quest to visit every country.
So far, he’s visited more than half. He arranged it so that liftoff would mark his 1,000th flight.
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.
Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, who is onboard with Wang, 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.
A polar orbit is ideal for climate and Earth-mapping satellites as well as spy satellites. That’s 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, Norway, where the original polar ship is on display, hopes the trip will draw more attention to climate change and the melting polar caps.
'Spaceflight is becoming increasingly routine'
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.
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 said via X last week.
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".
