With the drama around the first human spaceflight of the year behind it, SpaceX is back to the business of sending private customers to space.

The Fram2 mission headed by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur and three of his friends is targeting Monday, March 31, for liftoff from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A.

It would be the second human spaceflight of the year behind the Crew-10 launch for NASA from KSC earlier this month that set up the return of another Crew Dragon on the Crew-9 mission from the International Space Station.

That one brought home the Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were left behind on the station last year, and became the center of a national spotlight after President Trump and Elon Musk blamed the Biden Administration for leaving them up there for political reasons.

This next flight has a little less national attention, although it will be the first time humans have flown a polar orbit around the Earth.

SpaceX posted Saturday on X that the Crew Dragon Resilience was already at the KSC hangar and that the Fram2 crew had completed training in California last week aiming for liftoff at the end of the month.

The first launch window has target liftoffs at 11:20 p.m. March 31 with backups spilling over into April 1 at 12:53 a.m. and 2:26 a.m.

The first-stage booster is making its sixth flight to space, the same one that launched Crew-9 last September.

Crew-10 launched on March 14, so the Fram2 launch coming just 17 days later would mark a record turnaround for human spaceflight from the same pad.

The crew is headed up by Chun Wang, now of Malta, who in addition to being able to fund the mission is an avid adventurer. Along for the ride will be fellow adventurers Eric Philips of Australia, Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway and Rabea Rogge of Germany. Mikkelsen will take the role of mission commander and Philips the role of pilot.

Chun has been updating training progress on his X account.

“This morning, we spent over three hours in the Dragon simulator running through the deorbit and splashdown sequence. It was our final simulation at the Hawthorne training center,” he posted Friday.

He said the crew began training in December 2023, and SpaceX’s astronaut operations manager Haley Esparza said at the time, “Make yourself at home.”

“I didn’t quite believe her at the time — everything felt strange and unfamiliar. But now, more than a year later, we’ve finally graduated. This place has truly become our home — but now it’s time to say goodbye,” Chun posted.

SpaceX has flown 16 missions and 62 humans so far on its fleet of four Crew Dragon capsules, and was working on a fifth.

Crew Dragon Resilience debuted in 2021 for NASA’s Crew-1 mission to the station, but switched roles starting in 2021 when it flew billionaire and if confirmed the next head of NASA, Jared Isaacman, on his first trip to space, Inspiration4.

SpaceX pulled off the forward-facing docking apparatus from Crew-1 since Inspiration4 wasn’t headed for the space station. Instead it installed a cupola window that would allow Isaacman and his crew to get better views during their three-day orbital flight, which became the first time an all civilian crew flew to space.

Isaacman and a new crew of three returned to Resilience for last year’s Polaris Dawn mission, but this time SpaceX added the Skywalker spacewalk platform in place of the cupola, allowing Isaacman to become the first commercial astronaut to perform a tethered spacewalk.

For Fram2, though, the cupola is back.

Fram2 is named after a ship Fram, built in Norway that was used to help explorers such as Roald Amundsen get to the Arctic and Antarctica in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“Wang aims to use the mission to highlight the crew’s explorational spirit, bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to the larger public, and highlight how technology can help push the boundaries of exploration of Earth and through the mission’s research,” SpaceX posted to its website when it announced the mission last year.

Fram2 will last three to five days and venture to an altitude of between 264 to 279 miles, “leveraging insight from space physicists and citizen scientists to study unusual light emissions resembling auroras,” SpaceX posted.

The plan is to study the green and mauve thermal emissions and conduct other research to study the effects of spaceflight on the human body, including taking the first human X-ray images in space.

It’s also targeting the first Crew Dragon mission to not splash down off the coast of Florida as SpaceX moves recovery operations to the West Coast. The move was made to better control where the propulsion module called the trunk, which detaches from the spacecraft, returns to Earth during reentry. Crew-9’s splashdown last week may have been the final time a Crew Dragon makes a Florida return.

SpaceX has at least two more Crew Dragon missions planned this year, with the private company Axiom Space targeting a May liftoff to the International Space Station on what would be its fourth private mission. That would be followed by a mid-July trip to the station of the Crew-11 flight to replace Crew-10.

NASA has not announced when the relief flight for Crew-11 would be, but it will likely fall to SpaceX as Boeing’s certification of its Starliner still faces hurdles that could push its first rotational crew mission into 2026.

_____

©2025 Orlando Sentinel. Visit orlandosentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.