After launching Monday night from Florida, a SpaceX spacecraft carrying four international astronauts is beginning a historic mission around the Earth, circumnavigating its poles. 

With the help of a SpaceX rocket, the Fram2 mission—which was funded and directed by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Chun Wang—blasted into orbit. 

Fram2 is the next in line of commercial spaceflight endeavors, such as Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, which are also funded and directed by billionaire Jared Isaacman. The Fram2 crew is actually currently aboard the same Dragon spacecraft that the Polaris Dawn crew used to execute a historic spacewalk during a five-day mission in orbit in September. 

With NASA financing, Elon Musk's SpaceX created the Dragon vehicles, which are roughly 27 feet tall and 13 feet wide, to give the American space agency a means of transporting its personnel to and from the ISS. 

However, the orbiting laboratory will not be the docking location for the private Fram2 astronauts. 

To become the first humans to make a trip over Earth's poles, the crew will spend three to five days in low-Earth orbit aboard the Dragon. 

Fram2 Embarks on a Mission in Polar Orbit

According to SpaceX, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off the ground Monday night with distant lightning flashing, sending the Fram2 crew members into orbit before their Dragon capsule split apart to use its own thrusters to continue. 

The rocket was launched from NASA's historic Launch Complex 39A at the space agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at precisely 9:46 p.m. EDT, just as storms were rolling off the coast. 

In order to be reused for subsequent launches, the Falcon 9's first stage made a safe landing in the Atlantic Ocean on a SpaceX droneship station after liftoff. 

What is the mission of Fram2?

The Dragon’s four astronauts will fly from pole to pole and investigate Earth from a polar orbit for the first time. 

The mission is appropriately named after a Norwegian vessel that traveled to the North and South Poles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, the Fram—which means "forward" in Norwegian—made history by going farther north and south than any other ship had ever gone. 

However, it is infamously hard to identify the North and South Poles from space. 

The polar areas are not only invisible to astronauts on the ISS, but viewing them from orbit demands a flight path that isn't as close to the equator as is customary. 

A 90-degree circular orbit, or one that is precisely perpendicular to the equator, is the mission's intended flight path. The crew intends to examine Earth's polar regions while in orbit from a height of roughly 267 miles, which will enable the Dragon to travel in little over 46 minutes from the North Pole to the South Pole.