A few days after returning from space, Eric Philips found himself reaching for objects that weren’t there.
For four days aboard SpaceX’s Fram2 mission, gravity had ceased to matter. A cup could be pushed gently across the cabin. A body could float effortlessly from one end of the spacecraft to the other. Then suddenly it was over.
Back home in Australia, the veteran polar explorer would instinctively move as though he were still in orbit. “What’s going on?“ Philips remembers thinking. Then it would dawn on him. “Oh, that’s right: gravity.”
For weeks the explorer struggled to find words for what he had experienced. The journey had begun a few years earlier with a conversation on skis in the Arctic. Travelling side by side across the ice, he and entrepreneur Chun Wang found themselves talking about exploration: Mars, the moon and the future of human space flight. Months later Wang sent a text message: Would Philips like to go to space? His answer was immediate. “Yes, yes, yes.”
The invitation would eventually place Philips aboard Fram2, the first human mission to orbit directly over both the North and South Poles. To understand why the mission mattered, it helps to look back more than a century.
The mission’s name was a deliberate nod to Fram, the Norwegian exploration vessel that helped define the heroic age of polar exploration. Built in 1892, the ship, whose name meant to go forth, was designed to survive the crushing pressure of Arctic sea ice. Under explorer Fridtjof Nansen, Fram drifted deep into the Arctic in an ambitious attempt to reach the North Pole.
A decade later the same ship carried Roald Amundsen south. In December 1911 Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole, beating the British expedition led by royal navy officer Capt Robert Falcon Scott.
Scott’s Terra Nova expedition remains one of the most famous stories in exploration history. After discovering that Amundsen had arrived first, Scott and four companions died on their return journey from the Pole. Among the wider expedition team was Irish explorer Tom Crean, whose extraordinary endurance secured his place in Irish folklore and in the history of Antarctic exploration.
More than a century later, Fram2 sought to honour that same spirit of exploration. Only this time the vehicle was a SpaceX spacecraft orbiting 440km above Earth.
For Philips the mission represented the unlikely convergence of two lifelong passions: the polar regions and space. He remembers as a seven-year-old growing up in Australia, sitting in his school gymnasium watching the Apollo 11 Moon landing on a grainy black-and-white television. The experience awakened a fascination for exploration.
Over the following four decades Philips established himself as one of the world’s leading polar explorers, pioneering routes in Antarctica, guiding expeditions to both poles and helping shape the modern polar guiding profession. Space remained a distant dream. But then came Wang’s message.
Rabea Rogge, Eric Philips, Chun Wang and Jannickke Mikkelsen, the crew of the Fram2 mission who orbited the North and South Poles
The crew assembled for Fram2 reflected the mission’s exploratory spirit. Alongside Philips was Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, who would document the mission, and German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge, while Wang himself served as mission commander. None were career astronauts.
Fram2 was different from the popular image of wealthy passengers buying tickets to orbit. Over 18 months the crew underwent intensive SpaceX training covering spacecraft systems, emergency procedures, medical scenarios and survival skills. According to Philips, the standards expected of them mirrored those required of professional astronauts.
At one point Philips feared he might not make it. Initially assigned the role of vehicle pilot, he found himself overwhelmed by the technical complexity of spacecraft systems. A man accustomed to navigating ice fields and managing risk in some of Earth’s harshest environments suddenly found himself tracing faults through layers of software and electronics. “I just wasn’t capable of that,” he says.
Eric Philips in training for the expedition
Eventually positions were swapped and Philips became mission specialist and medical officer. That reshuffle transformed everything. His new responsibilities aligned perfectly with decades of expedition experience: assessing risk, responding to emergencies and caring for people in extreme environments. The experience taught him that success is not always about getting the role you want, but recognising where your strengths are most valuable.
By launch day, the crew felt ready, and in March 2025 a Falcon 9 rocket carried them into orbit. Life aboard Crew Dragon proved far from glamorous; the spacecraft was cramped, privacy was limited. The only barrier between crew members and the on-board toilet was a curtain. Sleeping was awkward. Movement required practice. Even simple tasks demanded adaptation.
Crew Dragon, the Falcon 9 rocket that carried the crew
The crew also had little free time. The Fram2 mission carried more than 20 scientific investigations, including the first X-ray performed in space aboard a commercial mission. Other experiments examined sleep, exercise and the human body’s adaptation to microgravity.
Philips spent every spare moment at the spacecraft’s cupola window and not always as much time as he would have liked. For him, the most profound moment came when he finally had the opportunity to absorb the view. Most astronauts describe Earth as a blue planet but Fram2’s polar orbit produced a different impression.
“Our perception was this white Earth,” Philips shares, because every 90 minutes, as they completed an orbit, the spacecraft travelled from Arctic to Antarctic and back again. The timing of the mission added another layer to the experience. Antarctica was entering winter darkness while the Arctic remained bathed in spring sunlight. The crew could see the frozen Arctic Ocean stretching across the top of the world while much of Antarctica appeared beneath a veil of darkness.
The view was particularly striking because of what the poles represent today. Scientists increasingly describe the Arctic and Antarctic as Earth’s early warning systems. Researchers continue to monitor accelerating glacier loss, instability in parts of the Antarctic ice sheet and concerns about the future behaviour of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the vast ocean circulation system that helps regulate Europe’s climate.
For Philips, who has spent decades travelling through both polar regions, the experience was unexpectedly emotional. He found himself moved to tears, not because he felt detached from Earth. Quite the opposite: the experience reinforced his connection to it. Years spent witnessing changes in glaciers, sea ice and polar environments suddenly took on a new perspective from orbit.
Like many astronauts before him, Philips also found himself reflecting on humanity’s tendency to divide itself. From orbit there were no visible borders, no political disputes, no signs of the arguments that dominate headlines. Just one world.
After splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, the Fram2 crew completed another first by exiting the spacecraft unassisted before beginning the slow process of readjusting to gravity. The mission may have changed Philips, but it also highlighted an interesting contrast between the people who undertake such journeys.
For Wang, Fram2 appears to have been one step towards an even bigger frontier. In May, Wang announced plans to command a future SpaceX Starship fly-by mission that would use a lunar gravity assist before heading towards Mars.
For Philips, the Fram2 experience carries a different weight. I met him afterwards at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. By then he had officially joined the ranks of astronaut explorers yet he seemed unchanged by the attention.
Thoughtful and endlessly curious, he spoke about space in much the same way he spoke about Antarctica: not as a destination, but as a place that reveals something important about ourselves.
Every generation explores its frontier using the technology available to it: Nansen had a wooden ship, Scott and Crean had sledges, Amundsen had ships and airships. And Philips and his crew mates had a spacecraft.
Looking down on the poles from orbit, he found himself connected not only to the future of exploration, but to its past. And from there he saw what he believes the rest of us too often forget: one fragile white world stretching from pole to pole beneath our feet.
Niamh Shaw is an engineer, scientist and writer