At 18.19 on Friday evening, the Norwegian astronaut Jannicke Mikkelsen and the rest of the space travelers landed on Fram 2 in the waters off California in the Pacific Ocean.
The rocket from Elon Musk's space company Space X took off early on Tuesday morning Swedish time from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Then it set off towards the South Pole, a journey that in the space rocket from southern USA only took about half an hour.
The self-driving capsule then continued for five days in a unique orbit around the Earth, which meant that the quartet on board got a good view of both the South and North Poles.
It was cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang who invited three fellow travelers on a privately funded space trip: Rabea Rogge from Germany, Australian Eric Philips, and film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, who thus became the first full-blooded Norwegian citizen in space. Swedish-Norwegian Marcus Wandt was on the International Space Station (ISS) last year.
The project also had a clear Norwegian profile otherwise. The capsule's name Fram 2 was taken from the Norwegian research vessel Fram, which the legendary polar explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen used from 1893 to 1912.
