SpaceX capsule with world’s first all-civilian orbital crew is set for splashdown in few hours. The Inspiration 4 space mission, the first spaceflight sent by SpaceX with a civilian crew of four, is set to land in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida on Saturday, ending a three-day flight that is the first into Earth orbit with an all-civilian crew.

SpaceX, a private rocket company funded by Elon Musk’s Tesla, said the capsule, named Dragon, was scheduled to land in the sea around 7 p.m. EST, shortly before sunset.

SpaceX prepared and launched the spacecraft from Florida and controlled its flight from its headquarters in the Los Angeles suburbs. The flight took off on Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, one of two reusable SpaceX rockets.

Within three hours, the capsule reached an orbital altitude of just over 585 km, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope and farther than any point man has reached since the end of NASA’s Apollo lunar exploration program in 1972.

The Inspiration4 team was led by its wealthy benefactor, Jared Isaacman, chief executive of the e-commerce firm Shift4 Payments Inc, who assumed the role of mission “commander.”

He had paid an undisclosed but reportedly enormous sum – put by Time magazine at roughly $200 million – to fellow billionaire Musk for all four seats aboard the Crew Dragon.

Isaacman was joined by three less affluent crewmates he had selected – geoscientist and former NASA astronaut candidate; Sian Proctor, 51, physician’s assistant and childhood bone cancer survivor; Hayley Arceneaux, 29, and aerospace data engineer and Air Force veteran; Chris Sembroski, 42.

Isaacman conceived of the flight primarily to raise awareness and donations for one of his favorite causes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading pediatric cancer center in Memphis, Tennessee, where Arceneaux was a patient and now works.

The Inspiration4 crew had no part to play in flying the spacecraft, which was operated by ground-based flight teams and onboard guidance systems, even though Isaacman and Proctor are both licensed pilots.

SpaceX already ranked as the most well-established player in the burgeoning constellation of commercial rocket ventures, having launched numerous cargo payloads and astronauts to the space station for NASA.

Two rival operators, Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc and Blue Origin, inaugurated their own astro-tourism services in recent months, with their respective founding executives, billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, each going along for the ride.

Those suborbital flights, lasting a matter of minutes, were short hops compared with Inspiration4’s three days in orbit.