SpaceX’s Historic Crew Dragon Caught By Camera In A Stunning Aurora!

A researcher at the German Antarctic research station Neumayer III was able to catch a glimpse of the historic Fram2 mission that SpaceX launched last week to the polar orbit. The mission was caught in an aurora. Fram2 was the first crewed space mission to orbit the Earth at its poles. It was part of a project to conduct scientific research primarily aimed at human spaceflight missions that last for a long time. After three days in space, the crew returned to Earth on Friday in the Pacific Ocean. Their splashdown marked the first time that SpaceX recovered a Crew Dragon from the West Coast.The Fram2 crew's splashdown on Friday was historic in several aspects.

First and foremost, it marked the conclusion of the first successful human spaceflight mission to the polar regions of the Earth. Second, the splashdown was also the West Coast's first crewed Dragon recovery. Due to its proximity to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where astronauts typically spend their post-flight time, SpaceX prefers the East Coast for its splashdowns. The Fram2 crew's splashdown on Friday was historic in a number of ways. First and foremost, it marked the conclusion of the first successful human spaceflight mission to the polar regions of the Earth. Second, the splashdown was also the West Coast's first crewed Dragon recovery. Due to its proximity to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where astronauts typically spend their post-flight time, SpaceX prefers the East Coast for its splashdowns. Finally, the mission was also the first in which astronauts exited the Crew Dragon without assistance from SpaceX's recovery teams. Because NASA astronauts spend months on the International Space Station (ISS) and must be recovered by external teams due to space-induced changes in their bodies, their departure was crucial to evaluating the effects of short-term spaceflight on the human body. To accommodate the new mission, SpaceX had to make a number of adjustments to the software on its ship and the Falcon 9 launch profile. These included shortening the Falcon 9 rocket's boostback burn due to the mission's launch trajectory and updating the ship's software to ensure that it would splash down in the water in the event of a post-launch emergency abort.