SPACEX ROCKET SHIP TAKES 1ST ALL-CIVILIAN CREW INTO ORBIT

Spacex’s first private flight streaked into orbit Wednesday night with two contest winners, a health care worker and their rich sponsor, the most ambitious leap yet in space tourism.

It was the first time a spacecraft circled Earth with an all-amateur crew and no professional astronauts.

A Spacex webcast of the launch showed Isaacman, 38, and his crewmates — Sian Proctor, 51, Hayley Arceneaux, 29, and Chris Sembroski, 42 — strapped into the pressurised cabin of their gleaming white Spacex Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience, wearing their helmeted black-and-white flight suits.

The Dragon capsule’s two men and two women are looking to spend three days going round and round the planet from an unusually high orbit — 100 miles (160 kilometers) higher than the International Space Station — before splashing down off the Florida coast this weekend. It’s Spacex founder Elon Musk’s first entry in the competition for space tourism dollars.

The recycled Falcon rocket soared from the same Kennedy Space Center pad used by the company’s three previous astronaut flights for NASA.