Four space tourists have safely arrived back on Earth after completing a novel space route on board one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX capsules.
Bitcoin tycoon Chun Wang, who chartered the SpaceX flight, and three others splashed down off the Southern California coast on Friday, pumping their fists in celebration of the successful voyage.
After taking off on Monday, it became the first human spaceflight to circle the globe above both the North Pole and South Pole – and the first Pacific splashdown for a space crew in 50 years.
The crew passed over the icy masses roughly every 40 minutes from 270 miles in the air.
The Dragon capsule was kitted out with a domed window that provides 360-degree views of the polar ice caps and everything in between.
The Chinese-born Mr Wang, now a citizen of Malta, had invited three associates – Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian polar guide Eric Philips – to join him on his private flight.
They all met in Svalbard, the Norwegian Arctic archipelago, he wrote on X.
Mr Wang declined to say how much he paid for the three and a half day trip. But the price tag reportedly comes in at $55m (£42m) per person.
Dragon capsule’s domed window provides 360 views, including here of part of a polar region on Earth. Pic: SpaceX via AP
It is the sixth fully private space mission for Elon Musk‘s space company.
SpaceX and its Dragon craft have dominated the emerging market for private space tourism.
Dragon is the world’s only capsule built by a private company – rather than a state-run organisation – that routinely flies missions in orbit.
Its rival, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, has been held up in development.
‘So epic’
“It is so epic because it is another kind of desert, so it just goes on and on and on all the way,” said researcher Ms Rogge in a video posted by Mr Wang on X while gazing down from miles above Earth.
All four suffered from space motion sickness when they first reached orbit, but adjusted by day two, according to Mr Wang.
The private astronauts conducted 22 research experiments during their mission, including exiting the capsule without the normal assistance from ground crew in a bid to demonstrate how easily people could walk off a spacecraft on the moon or Mars.
Spaceflight, especially on much longer missions, is known to reduce bone density and muscle mass – and have other impacts on the body that have long been studied by the likes of NASA.
SpaceX said it switched splashdown sites from Florida to the Pacific on safety grounds, as it would ensure any surviving pieces of the trunk – jettisoned at the end of a flight – would fall into the ocean.
The last people to return from space to the Pacific were the three NASA astronauts assigned to the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission.
