"...To boldly go where no man has gone before" launched every episode of Star Trek that I watched in reruns as a kid, but Monday night I watched as two men and two women did it for real aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship that put human beings into a polar orbit for the first time ever.
This is a bigger deal than you might think.
Fram2 is captained and financed by crypto billionaire Chun Wang and his hand-picked crew, consisting of cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, polar scientist Rabea Rogge, and explorer Eric Philips. None are former fighter pilots, NASA astronauts, or government employees of any kind. All show the kind of daring that would make Captain James T. Kirk proud.
Even dedicated space buffs were a bit taken aback when news of Fram2 reminded us that human beings had never flown a polar orbit before. You might wonder why, but Fram2's five-day mission has a stellar rationale.
Following Monday's successful launch and orbital insertion aboard a spaceship named Resilience, not Enterprise — alas! — they're conducting nearly two dozen experiments, including the first human X-rays in space. The crew will have plenty to keep them busy, but looking further forward, nothing might be more important than potentially deadly Van Allen Belt radiation. Apollo missions missed the worst of it by transiting quickly through the Belt, but orbital missions pass through it multiple times each day. Fram2 won't fly through the worst parts of the Van Allen Belt — just enough to gather vital data.
A cynic might say that Fram2 is nothing more than a billionaire's risky ego trip, but that science package will teach valuable lessons in how to shield crews outward bound for Mars. It's a long voyage, and getting there won't be easy.
When President John F. Kennedy announced his intention of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth," he said that America chooses to do these things, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
The commercialization of space, primarily so far by SpaceX, hasn't made getting to orbit any less audacious — it's "merely" much more routine. But commercialization has opened up space to a new mindset: "We do these things not because they are easy, but because we can."
All it takes is a little imagination, a lot of courage, and an estimated quarter of a billion dollars or so. It wasn't so long ago that no amount of money in the world could buy anyone a trip to orbit like Fram2, which comes just on the heels of the high-flying Polaris Dawn mission, another purely commercial effort.
Today, private spaceflights are for billionaires — or mere multimillionaires (and friends of Jeff Bezos) willing to settle for a suborbital joyride aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket. It won't be long before millionaires will enjoy short stays aboard luxury space stations in low Earth orbit, just like the ISS but much more comfy. After that, maybe a brief "spacation" won't cost much more than a trip to Disney World.
The thing about the future is that it always arrives sooner than you think. Fram2 brings Star Trek's 23rd century that much closer.
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