The mission’s purpose is predominantly marketing for private space travel, and the St Jude Hospital charity fund raiser.  The total amount of money spent on the mission remains unknown, but we do know the following: Jared Isaacman, the billionaire chief executive of Shift4 Payments, who has an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion, agreed to a confidential deal with SpaceX to travel into orbit, personally committing $100 million.

Separately, Inspiration4 had a goal of raising over $200 million dollars for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Presently, Falcon 9 rockets can cost under $30 million per launch, but the actual figure is currently unknown.

CEO Elon Musk has said since 2016 that the launch cost of a Falcon 9 rocket is $62 million, and SpaceX director of vehicle integration Christopher Couluris said in a media briefing in 2020 that SpaceX can bring costs down to under $30 million per launch.                                                                 

″The rocket costs $28 million to launch it, that’s with everything,” Couluris said, adding that the reuse of the rockets brings the price down significantly. SpaceX is the first company to launch, fly and land their rockets successfully for reuse over and over.

The Inspiration4 mission was likely to have extra costs, given the additional resources needed because it included a crew. Unlike most of its missions like the launch of its Starlink internet satellites, for instance – SpaceX had to make sure the crew were safe in orbit and when they landed back on earth.

During the Inspiration4 mission, Elon Musk pushed the total collected past the $210 million.

“Count me in for $50 million,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

The cost of the launch costs less than the money raised by the raffle ticket sales.

Almost 72,000 people entered the competition, raising around $113 million. The winner was chosen at random. Incidentally, the winner donated his prize to his friend, Chris Sembroski.

Another $60 million was raised by the time the crew returned to Earth.

Critics of private space launches, will argue that this flight has little other meaning bar advertising for SpaceX.

On its FAQ, the company had this to say: “hardship and suffering have unfortunately been present throughout human history, but we can no sooner turn away from the great need all around us than we can put innovation and progress on hold. We have to find ways to do both”.

SpaceX claims that Inspiration4 represented an investment in the future, so the problems of tomorrow can be solved.

“There have been a number of significant innovations and recent progress that we can attribute to space travel in our recent history alone, ranging from the health and medical advances such as improved water purification technology, greatly-improved human prosthetics, even bringing the world closer together through SpaceX Starlink program, would have been unaffordable had it not been for investments made years ago in reusable rocket technology”.

The cost of launching individuals like Virgin’s Richard Branson and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos into space in July also drew a fair amount of critics.

Although cited as ‘playboy and billionaires fun’, the truth is that Bezos donated $19 million from Blue Origin’s coffers while adding 200 million of his own fortune to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to fly to space.

Additionally, on the plus side, Richard Branson’s historic flight into space was worth $841 million for Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. as shares rose as much as 22% in trading.

So it seems using space flights for marketing, albeit whatever the expense, can pay handsomely.