This is John Batchel, speaking with my good colleague Bob Zimmerman about Fram 2, a mission,

a polar mission privately paid for. However, the significance here is not just that it was the first

man polar mission, nor that it was SpaceX and a dragon capsule, good for SpaceX, but they took

along a x-ray machine, a portable

x-ray machine, and made an x-ray in space, and Bob explains why this is critical and important,

and a moneymaker.

Bob Zimmerman, X-rays in space. More of this later.

Yes, this is the unmanned, sorry, the man's commercial private polar mission for M2 that

orbited for five days, I'm not exactly sure of the number, I think it was five days, around

the Earth last week.

One of the things they did, though, that is really interesting, I've got a picture on behind

the block, is they took equipment, portable equipment, developed by two different commercial companies in

US and Canada, this portable X-ray machine. And they used it in, while in orbit, to produce

the first X-ray images of a human being. And I've got a picture on behind the black of one of the astronauts.

And they don't say which one, the x-ray of it.

You can see the bones.

It's a really beautiful image.

And so these two companies are now marketing this x-ray machine for future space stations,

because obviously you've got to have a bones, you know, doctor

on the space station at some point with his own, you know, special equipment and of course

an x-ray machine is critical in space. To study bone density, this should have been done

years ago by NASA and it wasn't done.

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