At Ad Astra school of Elon Musk, children can make flamethrowers

Elon Musk opened a school called Ad Astra in SpaceX's offices – and a new report revealed that his program is absolutely wild.

A new report from Ars Technica has collected information about the school, including a freshly filed document filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which revealed that Musk is funding it for nearly half a million dollars.

Ad Astra (which means "to the stars" in Latin) has not really been a secret since its launch in 2014, but the details of what is happening at school have been rare. His website is enigmatic, containing only a logo, a contact email, and a portal for parents.

Musk, who has five sons, co-founded Ad Astra in Hawthorne, California with Professor Joshua Dahn. In an interview with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis last year, Dahn said that Ad Astra started with only eight children in a conference room at SpaceX with glass walls.

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The school currently has about 40 students, half of whom are children of SpaceX staff. The IRS document notes that it will probably never exceed 50 students "because of the intense staff on the student radio."

Musk spoke to Ad Astra of a Chinese TV channel in 2015. "There are no notes, so that all children go in the same class at the same time as an assembly line ", he said. Instead, children ages seven to 14 work as a team, and although they receive notes on their work, they do not receive letters at the end of a semester.

The wild program of Ad Astra

The Ad Astra study program is not conventional, it is the least that can be said. Students learn about artificial intelligence and how to give what is "essentially a TED talk," according to Dahn. Ethics is also explored through hypothetical scenarios: for example, deciding who is to blame for a plant that has polluted a nearby lake.

Sports and music are not on the program – although there is dodgeball at lunch, and Dahn says that one of the students is "probably objectively the best violinist under 12 in the world ".

Foreign languages ​​are also missing because of Elon Musk's personal philosophy that real-time translation software will soon make the subject obsolete.

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Instead, children learn different coding languages ​​(Scheme, Swift, and Scratch) and experiment with more applied science than in your average science lab.

"We blow up shit," says Dahn, speaking of the school's chemistry classes. Students can also build things in a module called "A-Frame", from weather balloons to battle robots.

Children would have asked if they could be allowed to incorporate flamethrowers and electromagnetic impulses into their robots. "The answer is always yes," laughed Dahn, "until you destroy the school."

To encourage the spirit of enterprise, Ad Astra also has its own currency unit called "Astra", which children can exchange with each other.

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"One of the things they do is three times a year, there is a market called the bazaar and at the bazaar the kids have their own businesses basically," Dahn said. He gives an example of a student who builds websites for his classmates, including one who makes "gourmet cookies".

According to the IRS document found by Ars Technica Musk, the school received $ 475,000 in 2014 and 2015. Dahn added, "It's extraordinarily generous and it allows us to take n & # 39; Any child who meets these needs.

Here is the full interview with Joshua Dahn, Ad Astra professor: