Entrepreneur Elon Musk has made it his business to take on spaceflight, an alluring but sometimes painfully stagnant area of technology. After helping to found PayPal, he moved on to Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which recently made the first commercial supply mission to the ISS. Now, Wired's Chris Anderson — who is himself leaving Wired to focus on startup 3D Robotics — has interviewed Musk about his original plans for SpaceX, the process of building and launching his rockets, and the possibility of a truly reusable spacecraft, which Musk calls "the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization."

Musk isn't the only man with a plan for space travel, but his company has seen a level of success that hasn't yet been replicated by competitors like Blue Origin or Sierra Nevada, and the piece is an excellent read for anyone who's wondering just how the average civilian (with, granted, a lot of money and ingenuity) can go from speculating about putting a garden on Mars to building the rockets that supply our astronauts.