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Elon Musk surprised his first entirely private crew of space tourists with a welcome gift home after their pioneering journey to orbit ended on Saturday night: a $ 50 million donation to St Jude Children’s Charity.
The billionaire founder of SpaceX tweeted Shortly after they splashed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida, he donated the money to the mission’s stated goal of raising $ 200 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee.
“Count me for $ 50 million,” Musk wrote, responding to a tweet from the crew of four that they were: “Happy. Healthy. Home.” The team asked for the public’s help in reaching their fundraising goal.
Travel sponsor and commander Jared Isaacman paid SpaceX undisclosed millions for the trip and donated the first $ 100 million himself to charity.
Isaacman, 38, entrepreneur and pilot, said he wanted to show that ordinary people can get into orbit on their own. He ran a lottery for one of the four seats and a contest for clients of his Allentown, Pa., Payment processing company Shift4 Payments for another.
Their SpaceX capsule was parachuted into the ocean just before sunset, not far from where their flight began three days earlier.
“On behalf of SpaceX, welcome to planet Earth,” said one mission controller. “Your mission has shown the world that space is for all of us.”
“Thank you very much, SpaceX,” Isaacman said. “It was a hell of a ride for us… I’m just getting started.”
The fully amateur crew were the first to tour the world without a professional astronaut. The fully automated Dragon capsule reached an unusually high altitude of 363 miles after takeoff on Wednesday. Passengers savored views of Earth through a large bubble-shaped window added to the top of the capsule.
The four were the first space travelers to complete their flight in the Atlantic from Apollo 9 in 1969. The previous two SpaceX crewed ditchings, carrying astronauts for NASA, were in the Gulf of Mexico. Crew members were to undergo medical examinations before traveling to Kennedy Space Center by helicopter to reunite with their families.
“It was a very clean mission from start to finish,” said Benji Reed, senior director of SpaceX.
Nearly 600 people have reached space – a scorecard that began 60 years ago and is expected to accelerate as space tourism heats up.
Reed plans up to six private flights a year, sandwiched between astronaut launches for NASA. Four SpaceX flights are already booked carrying paying customers to the space station, accompanied by former NASA astronauts.
The first is slated for early next year with three businessmen paying $ 55 million each. Russia is also planning to hire an actor and director to shoot next month and a Japanese tycoon in December.
Customers interested in fast travel turn to Virgin Galactic by Richard Branson and Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos. The two drove their own rockets to the far reaches of space in July. Their flights lasted 10 to 15 minutes.
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