SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who also happens to be the 2nd richest person in the world at the moment has announced that he will be donating $50 million to the Inspiration4 fundraiser campaign.
Inspiration4 was the first-ever civilian orbital flight where 4 persons from diverse backgrounds spent 3 days in space and SpaceX made this possible utilizing its Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft.
Part of the Inspiration4 space mission’s objective was to raise funds for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The Inspiration4 team had set a target for $200M by raising awareness through the spaceflight’s coverage around the globe.
“Count me in for $50M,” Elon Musk tweeted in response to an Inspiration4 tweet that was aimed at pushing the fundraising campaign forward.
St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis Tennessee treats kids with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. The facility will utilize these funds for further research in curing cancer and such illnesses.
$100M of this fundraising goal has been pledged by the Inspiration4 mission commander and billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman. These joint efforts will give hope to many parents and their children suffering from cancer.
As of this writing, Inspiration4 is around $39M short of its $200M goal (donate on official website here).
Elon Musk is not just working on making life multi-planetary with his work at SpaceX, he is also working to make planet Earth a better place to breathe as well. Besides making zero-emission cars at Tesla, Musk recently donated $100M to bring the best carbon capture technology to the mainstream.
The all-civilian crew of the Inspiration4 mission gave their first interview to the Today show. They say that they are already missing the spectacular view of our home planet from the Dragon space capsule.
Although SpaceX presented a concept design of the Crew Dragon that has a glass dome observatory earlier this year, it did not materialize at the time of the Inspiration4 launch.
Elon Musk poked fun at the US President yesterday after he came to know that Mr. Biden is not ready to acknowledge the 4 new civilian astronauts, “He’s still sleeping,” said Musk — pretty ironic.
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