Elon Musk pledges $50 million to Inspiration4 fundraiser for St. Jude, exceeding $200 million aim

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk helped obtain the St. Jude Youngsters’s Analysis Hospital fundraising aim of the Inspiration4 spaceflight, simply hours after his firm returned the crew from orbit.

The principle aim of the Inspiration4 mission, which launched on Wednesday and splashed down on Saturday, was to lift $200 million for St. Jude.

Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who bought the flight from SpaceX, donated $100 million personally to St. Jude. The Inspiration4 mission had raised one other $60.2 million in donations, earlier than Musk pledged to contribute $50 million himself – pushing the marketing campaign’s complete raised to greater than $210 million.

“Rely me in for $50M,” Musk mentioned in a tweet on Saturday.

The historic Inspiration4 mission with a non-public crew spent three days in house, carrying Isaacman, pilot Sian Proctor, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux and mission specialist Chris Sembroski. The crew orbited the Earth at an altitude as excessive as 590 kilometers, which is above the Worldwide Area Station and the furthest people have traveled above the floor in years.

The spaceflight achieved a number of milestones, together with: The primary non-public SpaceX spaceflight, the primary completely nonprofessional crew to turn into astronauts, the primary Black feminine spacecraft pilot, the youngest American astronaut so far, and the primary particular person to fly in house with a prosthesis.