SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission, which made history when its crew conducted the first spacewalk by non-government astronauts, concluded early Sunday with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.

The Dragon spacecraft plunged into the ocean at 0737 GMT, a webcast of the arrival showed, with a recovery team deploying in the pre-dawn darkness to retrieve the capsule and crew.

The capsule was lifted from the water and onto the recovery vessel half an hour later.

After brief medical checks, a smiling and waving SpaceX engineer Anna Menon was the first of the crew to exit, followed by engineer Sarah Gillis, pilot Scott Poteet and commander Jared Isaacman. A helicopter was due to transport them to land.

"Happy, healthy, home," the Polaris Program wrote on X. "A new era of commercial spaceflight dawns, with much more to come."

The four-member team led by fintech billionaire Isaacman launched Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center, quickly journeying deeper into the cosmos than any humans in the past half century as they ventured into the dangerous Van Allen radiation belt.

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.

Since completing their extravehicular activity, the crew continued to carry out roughly 40 science experiments, including inserting endoscopic cameras through their noses and into their throats to image their airways and better understand the impact of long-duration space missions on human health.

They also demonstrated 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.

The final Polaris mission aims to be the first crewed flight of SpaceX's Starship, a prototype next-generation rocket that is key to CEO Elon Musk's interplanetary ambitions.

(With input from AFP)