XCOR’s Jeremy Voigt has that dream, too. But as a twentysomething, he grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of the original series.

Two years ago he’d been just another college kid, following the “astronaut blueprint” by working toward a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Purdue University, where Armstrong studied. Voigt would get the requisite credentials: a doctorate, some patents and publications, and then apply to NASA to become an astronaut.

But on the advice of a professor he visited XCOR’s cramped World War II-era hangar, with its vintage wooden rafters, in Mojave. He met the company’s magnetic founder, Jeff Greason, and was offered an internship in 2012. A full time job followed.

“I walked into XCOR, and after my first week I didn’t see a need to do all of that stuff,” he explained. “This place has everything I’ve ever wanted in a job. I get to fire rocket engines. I get to do hands-on, critical stuff for the vehicle. And oh yeah, I get to go into space.”

In mid-August his boss, Greason, traveled from the California desert to Midland, a West Texas oil town that’s nearly as arid. The next morning Greason, tall, bespectacled and balding, picked up a ceremonial sledgehammer. He and a handful of other Midland officials knocked out a wall at a hangar at the city’s airport -- purely cheeseball stuff, like groundbreakings with mayors and gold-plated shovels.

Although known for oil and being the boyhood home of George W. Bush, Midland decided during the last energy crunch to diversify its economy. It chose space and two years ago struck a $10 million deal to lure XCOR from Mojave. Next year, after this hangar is renovated, the company will moved into considerably larger digs in Texas. Greason likes the open air space above Midland for flight tests, and the state’s less restrictive regulatory environment.

Less known than Musk or Bezos among the public at large, and certainly far less wealthy, within the new space community Greason is no less a celebrity.

A gifted engineer, he attended the California Institute of Technology and had the fortune to take a class taught by the legendary physicist Richard Feynman. While Greason was at Caltech when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart in 1986. Feynman served on the panel investigating the disaster. Feynman savaged NASA in his findings, saying the agency’s “safety culture” allowed management to overlook glaring problems and fly the shuttle anyway.

For a young electrical engineer learning how to find and fix problems in complex systems, NASA’s failure mystified Greason.

“It really took away for me the belief that NASA was a superhuman organization of God-like beings,” Greason said. “That doesn’t make them not a special place. But it’s part of the philosophical evolution I made to thinking, maybe other people can do spaceflight.”

Upon graduating Greason didn’t think “other people” included him. He figured there would eventually be lots of electrical things to work on in space so he took a job with Intel, where he helped invent the Pentium processor.

But the space bug never left, and in the early 1990s he stumbled onto an Internet group discussing space. That led to attending his first Space Access Conference, a hotbed of new space enthusiasts, in 1994.

“I was totally blown away,” Greason recalled. “I said that’s it. That’s what I want to do. I really care if we get off this planet, and I don’t really care if Intel has 85 or 90 percent market share next year.”