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Mission led by crypto magnate Chun Wang

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SpaceX's sixth private astronaut flight

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Crew includes VR director, robotics researcher, adventurer

(Adds new details on launch)

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) -

Elon Musk's SpaceX on Monday launched a crew of four private

astronauts led by a crypto entrepreneur on a mission to orbit

Earth from pole to pole, a novel trajectory in which no humans

have traveled before.

Maltese investor Chun Wang, a Chinese-born magnate who

founded a bitcoin mining company, is the bankroller and

commander of the SpaceX mission, named Fram2, a reference to the

Norwegian "Fram" ship that pioneered Arctic exploration at the

turn of the 20th century.

Wang and three associates launched aboard SpaceX's Crew

Dragon capsule at 9:47 p.m. EDT on Monday (0147 GMT on Tuesday)

from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, setting off for a

free-flying mission for three to five days, during which they

will partake in 22 research experiments largely centered on how

spaceflight and microgravity affect the human body.

The four crew members on Monday afternoon were driven to the

launchpad in a caravan of Teslas - the electric cars of Musk's

other company - winding through the roads of Cape Canaveral,

Florida, with a police escort, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

launched overhead in an unrelated Starlink mission.

"We're gonna watch a rocket launch while on our way to a

rocket launch," Wang wrote on X, the social media site owned by

Musk, alongside a video of a Falcon 9 climbing the skies to

space during their drive.

The mission, SpaceX's sixth private astronaut flight, is the

company's latest novel effort that expands its dominance in the

global human spaceflight arena. It comes as Musk's power as

SpaceX CEO and the world's richest man soars as he works as a

close adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, a role that has

given him extraordinary influence for a businessman over an

array of U.S. policy matters.

Fram2 is the 16th crewed mission overall using the reusable

Crew Dragon, a gumdrop-shaped spacecraft that SpaceX developed

with NASA funding to provide the U.S. space agency a ride for

its astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

SpaceX and its Dragon craft have dominated the nascent

market for private orbital spaceflight, an area in which a key

source of demand originally came from a small field of wealthy

tourists. Dragon is the world's only privately built capsule

routinely flying missions in orbit, as Boeing's ( BA ) Starliner

capsule is held up in development.

In recent years, with Dragon flights costing roughly $55

million per seat, the spaceflight market - involving companies

such as Axiom Space that contract Crew Dragon missions - has

fixated more on astronauts from governments willing to pay the

sum mainly for national prestige and bolstering domestic

spaceflight experience.

But the Fram2 crew is untethered from government backing.

Wang's friends include Norwegian film director Jannicke

Mikkelsen, who specializes in virtual-reality cinematography;

German robotics researcher and polar scientist Rabea Rogge, and

Australian adventurer Eric Philips, who has taken up ambitious

skiing expeditions in Earth's harsh polar regions.