A wealthy space tourist and three fellow adventurers plunged back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Friday, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California to close out the first crewed flight around Earth's poles.

By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Four private astronauts returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Friday after roughly four days orbiting the planet in a novel polar trajectory, walking out of their spacecraft with little assistance to cap off the Elon Musk-led company's sixth fully private space mission.

Fram2 will be the company's first astronaut mission to land in the Pacific Ocean. Its predecessors all splashed down off Florida, but SpaceX is now shifting returns to the West Coast to minimize the chance that chunks of Crew Dragon's expendable trunk could damage property or hurt people during reentry.