The first humans to orbit Earth from pole to pole are sharing some of the amazing views they’re witnessing from space.
The four astronauts of SpaceX’s Fram2 mission are on their third day aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience, and are beaming content from their flight back down for the world to gaze at in awe. In videos shared on X, Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang is showcasing the crew’s novel views of the Arctic and Antarctica as Resilience circles the globe about every 90 minutes.
One of those videos looks down on Earth as the capsule flies over Florida, zooming in on the string of launch facilities on the Atlantic coast managed by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. “I can see our launch pad from here!” says one of the Fram2 crew off-camera, with Chun responding, “It is our launch pad! Oh my god!”
Flying over our launch site. pic.twitter.com/eHatUsOJ20April 3, 2025
Maltese cryptocurrency billionaire Wang is funding the Fram2 mission, which also includes Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway, Rabea Rogge of Germany and Eric Philips of Australia — all of them spaceflight rookies. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the quartet aboard Resilience from KSC’s Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) on Monday (March 31).
Related: Watch chilling 1st views of Earth’s poles seen by SpaceX Fram2 astronauts (video)
In the newly released Fram2 video, the camera is focused on the gorgeous aquamarine waters surrounding Florida before zooming in on the outcropping of Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island on the Space Coast. LC-39A sits just below the northernmost pad at the Cape’s launch facilities — seen in the video just to the right of the leftmost facility, LC-39B, which served as the jumping-off point for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Artemis 1 mission in November 2022.
Wang described Fram2’s ride to space just a few hours after launch, saying the Falcon 9 liftoff felt much smoother than expected. “Apart from the final minute before SECO [second engine cutoff], I barely felt any G-forces — it honestly felt like just another flight,” Wang wrote.
The lengthy post also talks about the crew’s initial bout with motion sickness as they all adjusted to microgravity, some ham radio transmissions between Rogge and Berlin, X-ray images the crew were able to take, a movie night watching replays of their own launch and their first time opening Resilience’s forward hatch to gaze out the spacecraft’s large cupola window.
“The ride to orbit was much smoother than I had anticipated. Apart from the final minute before SECO, I barely felt any G-forces—it honestly felt like just another flight.
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I had imagined it would feel like being in an elevator that suddenly drops, but that sensation never came. If I hadn’t set free Tyler, the polar bear zero-gravity indicator, I might not have realized we were already weightless. I think being tightly strapped into our seat buckets made the transition less noticeable.
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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. 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.
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Rabea spent some time on the ham radio, making contact with Berlin. No one asked opening the cupola on the first day—we were all focused on managing the motion sickness. We had a movie night watching our own launch and went to sleep a bit earlier than scheduled. We all slept really well.
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By the second morning, I felt completely refreshed. The trace of motion sickness is all gone. We had breakfast, took a few X-ray images, and opened the cupola three minutes after midnight UTC—right above the South Pole.
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Stay tuned.”
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Another video from Wang, captioned “Flight Day 3,” features a round of clips that show a large storm swirling over an ice-blanketed Earth below as the crew can be heard discussing different cloud formations and “Arctic hurricanes.” The same video also shows a quick view of Florida as Resilience passes through Earth’s night side, and a view of what the crew observes to be Norway’s Svalbard Islands back in the sunlight.
At the end, Phillips, the Fram2 medical officer, is seen on a video call with his son. “He’s in Los Angeles waiting for us to splash down,” Phillips says, adding, “That’s going to be tomorrow.”
The Fram2 mission was scheduled to last a total of three to five days, following the March 31 liftoff. A return to Earth on Friday (April 4), would be in line with that expectation, but official word about Resilience’s return has not yet been announced by SpaceX.
When Fram2 does return, Resilience will make a parachute-assisted splashdown somewhere off the coast of California — the first of SpaceX’s crew missions to land in the Pacific Ocean as the company shifts its recovery operations away from Florida.