Last summer, classic-“Star Trek” geeks were captivated when the full-sized mockup of the Galileo shuttlecraft that ferried passengers to and from the U.S.S. Enterprise was offered in an online auction in Ohio. After eleven days of bidding, Adam Schneider of Livingston, New Jersey, was the winner. He paid seventy thousand one hundred and fifty dollars for the Galileo, but he’s not keeping it. He wants to donate it to an air-and-space, science, or children’s museum—any place that can accommodate its twenty-four-foot-long, one-ton corpus.

“It’s not exactly a living-room piece,” said Schneider, who has filled four rooms of his house with trophies, like an eleven-foot, four-hundred-pound Starfleet dry dock from “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

Right now, the Galileo is being restored at Master Shipwrights, a boat-building operation in Atlantic Highlands, near Sandy Hook. On a cold Saturday morning, the repair crew was noisily straightening out the van-shaped shuttle’s metal skeleton and fitting wood bracings to its new plywood hull. Temporarily stripped of its twin tubular, eighteen-foot propulsion units, the Galileo sat on concrete blocks and a dolly under the gaze of a large portrait of Cosmo Kramer that was hung high on the workshop wall.

“I think it’s sharp,” said the welder and grinder Ken Foster. “You could put a set of outboards on it and row it across the bay.”

“It looks like an amphibious duck,” said his colleague Frank Monticelli.

“No,” said Foster, “an armored personnel carrier.”

Schneider, a principal at Deloitte, is an amiable man who calls to mind Ray Romano. But he wasn’t happy to see some disintegrating pieces of the Galileo’s vintage exterior lying on the floor. “I need this out of there,” he said. “That’s valuable. Maybe it goes on the wall if no one wants it.”

Master Shipwrights’ gray-bearded owner, Hans Mikaitis, hefted a chunk bearing the faded black registration number 1701/7 and, below that, the fragmentary letters “ERPRISE.” “Not a hell of lot of this one,” he muttered. “But it’s got to be worth at least a thousand bucks.”

The Galileo spent more than forty years getting passed among owners who tried, without much success, to spruce it up and exhibit it; sometimes it was in storage but mostly it was exposed to the elements. The ship was a crumbling wreck when it arrived, in late October, its guts ornamented with raccoon excrement and a few mouse carcasses.

“When I saw it for the first time, I said, ‘This needs a lot of T.L.C.,’ ” said Foster. “Pictures didn’t do it justice.”

Schneider shrugged. “Listen, it would have been fabulous if the wood was in great condition and we could just slap a new coat of paint on it—”

“But the more we dug into it,” Foster interrupted, “the more it was rotted rotted rotted rotted. The only way to rebuild it was to stick to the frame and start all over.”

“I bought it without looking at it,” Schneider acknowledged.

“This is how he operates,” said his wife, Leslie, who was taking photographs.

Schneider shrugged again. “Well, this is my thing. Fixing strange starships would appear to be my life’s passion.”

The shuttle was built in 1966, by a twelve-member team working for two months around the clock supervised by its main designer, a California automotive customizer named Gene Winfield. Schneider is in close touch with Winfield, who is now eighty-five (“He was shocked that people could give a crap about this”), but no vintage blueprints or as-built plans exist. So even with paint chips, screen grabs, and myriad other guides, the team is bracing for mistakes.

“I’m sure,” said Monticelli, “we’ll have the critics going after us for silly little things.”

Another challenge is that the Galileo’s interior was too cramped for actual filming; a separate, roomier set was used to depict the action within. So, while the ship’s hull should be finished by April, Schneider hasn’t quite decided how to fashion the insides. He does want at least one special feature: “A control panel that will explode. Because in the TV show it always exploded.”

Mikaitis regarded him. “You’re thinking. What’re you thinking about?”

“I’m just shaking my head,” said Schneider. “What’s the expression—‘another fine mess you’ve gotten me into’?” He turned to Leslie. “Right, honey?”

At one o’clock, the crew adjourned for lunch to a nearby restaurant, On the Deck, overlooking the water. When Monticelli’s cell phone went off, belting forth a “Star Wars” Imperial March ringtone, there was a collective groan. “Get your franchise right!” said Schneider.

“So what’s your next project?” Mikaitis asked him.

“Well, there are other shuttles,” Schneider said.

Leslie pointed her finger at her husband, cocked her thumb, and pulled the trigger.