LJMU science experiment aboard SpaceX flight

Following news at the weekend that SpaceX will launch a polar orbit human spaceflight mission, it has been revealed that the mission will undertake 22 scientific experiments – one led by LJMU!

The Fram2 mission will be operated by SpaceX with a Crew Dragon spacecraft on behalf of a 4-person civilian crew led by entrepreneur Chun Wang.

SpaceX is targeting Monday, March 31, 2025 for Falcon 9 to launch the Fram2 crew aboard Dragon to a 90-degree circularized orbit, allowing the crew to fly over and explore the Earth’s polar regions from low-Earth orbit for the first time.

The mission is named after the original Fram ship that first reached the Earth’s polar regions in the 1800s, and honours the adventuring spirit of early polar explorers while reaching new milestones for technology, commercial space travel and research

During the three to five-day mission, the crew will conduct scientific research, including a study led by Professor Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time, at Liverpool John Moores University, which aims to understand how we experience time during space travel.

As the limits of human space travel are pushed ever further, the duration of time that astronauts are required to spend in alone in space is increasing. To get to Mars astronauts will need to spend at least 16 months in space just to make the journey there and back. Making missions such as these feel like they are passing quickly may be key to improving tolerance of long periods of isolation and confinement aboard spacecraft.

Professor Ogden, in the School of Psychology, said: “Through partnership with SpaceX, we are examining how astronauts experience time during spaceflight. Astronauts will be asked to monitor their sense of time, and report how changes in their sense of time (time feeling like it is passing more quickly or slowly than normal) affect their wellbeing and performance.

“We hope that the data generated will help us to understand how we can speed up the subjective passage of time in space, potentially enabling longer future missions.”