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Most conventional education teaches students how to memorize the answers that previous generations agreed on, rather than questioning whether the premise was ever true in the first place.When Elon Musk founded the Ad Astra school inside SpaceX headquarters in 2014, the goal wasn't to build a traditional prep school; it was an experiment in teaching kids how to think through a physics framework.In rare classroom footage, Musk can be seen breaking down the problem just as he did when starting SpaceX: looking directly at the physics and raw economics of a rocket. Standard aerospace contractors had spent decades claiming orbital spaceflight had to cost hundreds of millions of dollars because that's simply what it had always cost. Reasoning from first principles ignores that consensus. It asks what the vehicle is physically made of—aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber—and discovers the raw materials cost barely two percent of the retail ticket. If the physics and the periodic table don't demand an astronomical price, the constraint is just bad process. Passing that mindset down to kids turns problem-solving from an exercise in following instructions into the art of reconstructing reality from the ground up.#ElonMusk #AdAstra #SpaceX #FirstPrinciples #Physics #Education #RocketScience #Innovation #AerospaceNow