“It’s the engineer’s dream job,” he says. “Most engineers sit behind a desk all day, I don’t. I get to come out here in the shop, turn wrenches and fire rocket engines.”

He looks around the crowded hangar, crammed with bits of rocket motor and partially constructed spaceplane. “If I was at Nasa, I would be part of a large team of engineers working on something,” he says excitedly. “Here I actually lead the rocket test, I get to push the button.”

The way of working at Mojave, in small teams with limited resources, is completely different to the way the space agencies work. Many people compare what is going on at Mojave with the early days of Silicon Valley and it is easy to draw parallels between the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer, and the Xcor workshop. Maybe the young engineers here will have equally world-changing effects.

4. The cost of reaching space will go down

Right now, if you want to launch a satellite, it will cost upwards of $12m and that is before the compulsory insurance (which can sometimes double the price). Not only can conventional space rockets only be used once, they are extremely expensive to launch – and there is limited competition.

Compare that with the $250,000 cost of a flight on the reusable Virgin spaceplane. Scientific institutions have already signed up to fly experiments on these sub-orbital flights. If the next generation of space planes can reach orbit then that will massively reduce the cost of getting into space.

This means we will be able to launch satellites, spacecraft and space exploration missions for a fraction of the cost. The final frontier could finally become economically viable to a lot more people.

It is certainly something that gets CEO of Virgin Galactic and ex-Nasa employee, George Whitesides excited. “By lowering the cost of space access, we’ll be able to do things like sending little nanosats all over the Solar System and do all this incredible science, that is so expensive now,” he says. “If we are able to tackle some of these challenges by demonstrating access to space technologies, then I think that will be profound.”

5. Hypersonic travel could become a possibility

Remember the idea that you can take off from London, fly into space and touch down in San Francisco an hour or so later? When discussing technologies that are promised but never quite deliver, a close runner-up behind flying cars has to be so-called sub-orbital point-to-point travel. Could the space tourism companies at Mojave finally help make this dream a reality? George Whitesides thinks so: “This is fundamentally transformational for humanity,” he tells me.