The Dragon spacecraft landed in the ocean at 3.37pm (HK time), a webcast of the splashdown showed, with a recovery team deploying in the pre-dawn darkness to retrieve the capsule and crew.
They hit a peak altitude of 1,400 kilometers - more than three times higher than the International Space Station and the furthest humans had ever traveled from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon.
"Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world," he told mission control.
Since Dragon doesn't have an airlock, the entire crew were exposed to the vacuum of space.It marked a "giant leap forward" for the commercial space industry, said NASA, as well as another triumphant achievement for SpaceX.
Though the company was only founded in 2002, it has outpaced its legacy competitors thanks in large part to founder Elon Musk's vast fortune and zeal to begin the colonization of Mars.Since completing their extravehicular activity, the crew have continued to carry out roughly 40 science experiments, including demonstrating connectivity with SpaceX's Starlink internet satellite constellation by sending back to ground control a high-resolution video of Gillis playing "Rey's Theme" by Star Wars composer John Williams, on the violin.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.Agence France-Presse
