IT Blog

Elon Musk arrived in Washington, D.C., to remind people how anxious he is to depart Earth. 

In a rambling, 45-minute talk at the Satellite 2020 conference, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO held forth on his plans to build enormous and rapidly reusable Starship rockets and bring bandwidth around the world with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation—and shared his views on learning, in both classrooms and companies.

Musk’s onstage interviewer, Satellite 2020 chair Jeffrey Hill, started the conversation by asking a nervous-looking Musk about the next major item on SpaceX’s to-do list: launching American astronauts to the International Space Station on its Crew Dragon capsule.

“It’s great that we’re about to launch to orbit,” Musk said. He noted that this Crew Dragon mission—which should break a Russian monopoly on transporting U.S. astronauts to the ISS that began with the Space Shuttle’s retirement in 2011—would come 18 years after SpaceX’s founding. “Kid could be…