April 4 (UPI) -- SpaceX's Fram2 mission, the first crewed mission to orbit Earth's north and south poles, ended when the Crew Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific on Friday morning.
The capsule went down off the coast of Oceanside, Calif., at 9:19 a.m. PDT. The last time humans returned from space to the Pacific Ocean was during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission with three NASA astronauts.
SpaceX plans to move its recovery operations from Florida to ensure that any pieces fall safely in the ocean instead of land in Florida near the Atlantic Ocean.
This trip, which included orbiting Earth 55 times, was privately funded and carried out 22 research and science experiments, with many evaluating crew health. They passed over the two poles every 46 minutes.
SpaceX announced the night before the crew would return to Earth on Friday, ending the five-day mission.
The four civilians from four countries donned their spacesuits and made their final cabin preparations. The deorbit was 8:26 a.m.
The four main parachutes slowed the capsule's velocity at approximately 9:16 am. at an altitude of 6,500 feet.
It slowed from about 120 mph to 16 mph.
In an experiment for the first time, the crew left the capsule on their own rather than aided by personnel. Unlike on the International Space Station, they don't deal with the total effects of no gravity.
Carrying bags of equipment, they then went into the recovery vessel Shannon, which is named after Shannon Walker, the first NASA astronaut to fly on SpaceX's Dragon during the Crew-1 mission.
SpaceX successfully launched the private Fram2 Monday night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The four-person crew, mission commander Chun Wang of Malta; vehicle commander Janice Mikkelsen of Norway; pilot Rabea Rogge of Germany and medical officer Eric Phillips of Australia were traveling in low Earth orbit.
Wang, a cryptocurrency billionaire born in China, co-founded the bitcoin mining company f2poool in 2013. Mikkelson is a filmmaker, Roggie a robotics researcher and Philips a polar guide.
Chen posted Thursday about trips over the poles.
Chun posted to X on Wednesday that all four crew members experienced space motion sickness in their first few hours in microgravity and throughout the first day but managed to sleep well and by the second day all had adjusted to their situation.
The crew took the first x-ray in space, tested how human cognition can adapt to the spaceflight environment within the first few hours of reaching space, completed a brain mapping electroencephalography experiment, and took a continuous glucose monitor study to see how fluid shifts in space can affect the readings taken by glucose monitors for diabetics, among other experiments.
"Proud to be able to bring to space some incredible cameras and lenses capturing the first images of the Arctic and Antarctic shot by humans from space," Fram2 Vehicle Commander and cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen posted to X from space Thursday, "These videos are big in file size and we look [forward] to sharing them with you post-mission splashdown."
Fram2 was named a ship that means "forward" in Norwegian.
The Frams carried explorers in the Arctic and Antarctic between 1893 and 1912. Some wood from the original ship, which is now at a museum in Oslo, Norway, went into space.
