SpaceX brought back to Earth on Friday the four crew members of the private polar Fram2 mission that launched from Kennedy Space Center on Monday night.

Watch Dragon and the @framonauts return to Earth after orbiting the Earth’s poles for almost four days → https://t.co/vSt6tfeLZG https://t.co/ERTGAPJwke

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 4, 2025

The Crew Dragon Resilience made a parachute-assisted splashdown off the California coast at 12:19 p.m. EDT (9:19 a.m. PDT) after spending more than 3 1/2 days circling the planet on the first human spaceflight on a polar orbit.

Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur Chun Wang, now of Malta, paid an undisclosed price for the jaunt to space getting a unique view of some of the same places in the Arctic and Antarctica to which he had trekked by land.

Flight Day 4

I woke up early and watched the launch of Starlink Group 11-13 on YouTube. Shortly after, SpaceX contacted us and informed us that we would be flying over Mongolia during the second stage deorbit burn. We opened the cupola and tried to observe the event, but had no… pic.twitter.com/OyOlShGYLP

— Chun (@satofishi) April 4, 2025

He brought along friends and fellow adventurers Eric Philips of Australia, Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway and Rabea Rogge of Germany, all of whom had experience exploring the Arctic.

1st day in space filled with nausea for SpaceX’s private polar mission crew

The California landing was a first for a SpaceX Crew Dragon, although cargo versions of the spacecraft had previously returned off the Pacific Coast before SpaceX moved operations to Florida.

The company made the decision last year, though, to switch back to the Pacific. The move was made for safety reasons after several incidents were reported of debris found on land that were determined to be remnants of the propulsion module that detaches from Dragon before splashdown.

While the Fram2 mission was a private endeavor, the crew performed 22 research experiments during the trip including taking the first X-ray in space.

The capsule was brought up onto one of SpaceX’s recovery vessels less than 30 minutes after landing.

The four planned to exit the spacecraft without any assistance.

Private SpaceX mission launches humans on 1st polar orbit

This marked the completion of Resilience’s fourth trip to space after having debuted on NASA’s Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station in 2020 followed by the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions paid for by billionaire and likely next NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

It’s the only Crew Dragon to be outfitted with something other than a forward-facing docking hatch, since its last three flights including this one had not required meeting up with the space station.

Instead, on both Inspiration4 and Fram2, SpaceX installed a nearly four-foot-wide, domed cupola window to allow for 360-degree views while on orbit. On Polaris Dawn, that was switched out for the Skywalker apparatus that let Isaacman perform the first commercial spacewalk.

SpaceX has flown 66 people in space aboard its fleet of four Crew Dragons on 17 missions since 2020. A fifth Dragon is under construction.

The next trip is slated to be the private Axiom Space Ax-4 mission taking a short trip to the space station with liftoff no earlier than May. After that, SpaceX has the Commercial Crew Program rotational crew mission Crew-11 targeting mid-July to fly up and relieve the Crew-10 mission that arrived to the station last month.