A crew of astronauts have become the first-ever people to orbit over Earth’s north and south poles and they have done so with an incredible view thanks to the cupola installed on their spacecraft.

The Fram2 mission launched onboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft that has a cupola module allowing the astronauts a 360-degree view of space and Earth. The glass dome is 2,000 square inches making it the largest single window ever flown to space. The window occupies the same space as the docking port meaning if it rendezvous with the International Space Station then the cupola won’t be equipped.

SpaceX shared a video (below) taken from the space window showing the Arctic polar region as well as the Antarctic polar region.

In a potential step toward sending small spacecraft to the stars, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, ultra-reflective membrane designed to ride a column of laser light to incredible speeds.

Since its launch in 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has traveled over 15 billion miles into deep space. That’s a long way—but it’s not even 1% of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. If humans are going to send ships to the stars, space travel will have to get a lot faster.

One promising way to pick up that kind of speed is a “lightsail”—a thin, reflective membrane that can be pushed by light much the same way that wind pushes a sailboat. Lightsails have the potential to reduce flight time to nearby stars from several thousand years using current propulsion systems to perhaps just a decade or two.