The official “10, 9, 8…” countdown has not quite begun, but later this morning, at 9:46 am ET, Australian polar guide Eric Philips and his three fellow astronauts will blast off into space from Florida’s Cape Canaveral aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. For the next three-and-a-half days, they will orbit the Earth via the North and South Poles — an orbital track never done before.
For the 62-year-old Philips, this late-career opportunity came out of the blue. He was guiding a ski tour on Svalbard. One of the participants, Chun Wang, was interested in talking about space. It turned out that Wang had made a fortune in the early years of bitcoin mining and wanted to buy a commercial space flight from SpaceX. He invited Philips to join him, along with two other Svalbard acquaintances, Rabea Rogge and Jannicke Mikkelsen. The cost of the flight is undisclosed, but previous private missions on SpaceX cost around $200 million.
The four of them have been training at SpaceX headquarters near Los Angeles for the past several months. Now, weather permitting, the big day has arrived.
Among their many new experiences, Philips, who wears glasses, has learned to wear contacts for the first time so his glasses won’t fog up inside the space suit. However, sometimes myopia temporarily clears up in zero gravity, so he might find that he no longer needs them — at least for those three-and-a-half days.
You can watch the launch live and follow what they call the Fram2 mission, named after the famous Norwegian polar ship, here.
Ready to go. Photo: SpaceX
