The grainy black-and-white television images flickered and burned indelibly into the little girl’s mind.

It was May 5, 1961. Dee Chester, age 5, watched astronaut Alan Shepard take an elevator to the top of an 83-foot missile and blast off into space. And she was mesmerized.

“That looks cool,” Chester said to her parents. “I want to do that.”

The next day, Lee and Agnes Chester suggested to their daughter that she start chasing her passion by collecting newspaper and magazine clippings. They bought her plastic model kits so she could put together space capsules. They took her to the library near their home in the San Fernando Valley, where she checked out the book “Into Space with the U.S. Astronauts,” over and over, for four months in a row.

“Space became the most important thing in her life,” said Kerry Chester, her brother. “She fell in love with the whole space thing.”

But her collection, which grew to more than 12,000 items over the decades, seemed as close as Chester would ever get to the space program. Becoming an astronaut seemed impossible.

Dee Chester had this condition that prevented her from chasing her dream.

She was a girl.

“Girls could not go into test pilot school,” Chester said. “They were not encouraged to join the military. My teachers probably thought I was crazy …

“They’re not laughing now.”

Plenty of space

Chester, 63, lives a few blocks from the Orange County fairgrounds, where she has worked as a part-time security guard for 30 years. She warns visitors to her home:

“It’s a little cluttered.”

When you step inside, you soon see Chester can be understated. A little cluttered? The house is chock full. Every space seems to be full of space.

“It looks like a hoarder house,” said her brother Kerry. “But her house is basically a space museum.”

There are flight suits and helmets and flags; spacecraft models and stickers and autographed pictures. She has astronaut Gus Grissom’s slide rule. She has cheese crack cubes, a container of Tang and a cup of pudding that has traveled to space and back.

There is a creepy, life-sized mannequin of Wyatt Earp sitting on the couch. He has nothing to do with space.

“I like Wyatt Earp,” she said.

A 1988 Mercedes 560SL with the license plate “MOONGAL” is parked in the driveway. The car once belonged to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who bought it as a gift for his wife. Chester doesn’t want to say how much she paid for it.

Chester’s collection of space stuff is so cool museums call her.

Teachable moments

When Chester was in seventh grade, she remembers a teacher making several mistakes when describing the spacecraft used in NASA’s Mercury and Gemini programs. The teacher, possibly miffed by Chester’s corrections, offered to let the student teach the class.

So she did.

“I brought my plastic models,” she said.

Gus Grissom was her favorite, and he was the NASA director of flight crew operations’ pick to be the first man on the moon on what eventually would be the Apollo 11 mission.

But on Jan. 27, 1967, 2½ years before Neil Armstrong had the historic honor, Grissom was inside the command module of the Apollo 1 rocket, commanding the three-man crew in a takeoff rehearsal, when a fire broke out.

Grissom, command module pilot Ed White and lunar module pilot Roger Chaffee all died. Today, Chester owns the flight suit that Grissom was supposed to wear on his moon launch.

“He was scrappy,” she said of Grissom. “His engineering mind was tremendous. He never got the credit he deserved. It wasn’t right.”

Chester says now that she should have been an engineer, like Grissom.

“If I could do it over, I would get my engineering degree.”

School was boring for such a space-minded girl. She graduated from Corona del Mar High in 1974 and, bored by the prospect of college, went to work for Broadway, the now-defunct department store. She sold home goods while she dreamed about space.

People who met Chester immediately could tell she had a passion for life outside the Broadway stores.

After almost 20 years in retail, she was struck by an idea. “Why don’t I teach?” she asked herself. “I could teach … space.”

In 1992, she earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Chapman University. A year later, she landed a job teaching eighth graders in the Garden Grove Unified School District.

She taught space.

“She knew all about space,” said Chester’s friend, Barbara Cook, who was also a teacher. “You could ask her any question. What flight? What astronaut? And she knew the answer. It was unbelievable.”

Space junk

Sometime in the 1980s, she doesn’t remember precisely when, Dee Chester decided that she was going to space – by any means necessary.

She signed up with a company called Celestis: Memorial Spaceflights. For a fee of $4,200 (now, according to the company website, the price is $12,400), they agreed to shoot her cremated remains into the great beyond.

“I’ll make it to space, dead or alive,” Chester said. “I’ll be space junk.”

Her remains will join Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and drug guru Timothy Leary. Floating forevermore.

Chester wasn’t satisfied with that. She wanted to see space when she got there.

In the late 1990s, she volunteered to work behind the scenes in the X Prize, a corporate race to get manned rockets into space. During that contest, she met billionaire Richard Branson.

In 2004, Branson founded Virgin Galactic with the idea of sending civilian tourists into space.

Civilians in space … perfect for Chester. But there was a catch, a very expensive catch.

The price tag, at the time, was $200,000 per ticket (now $250,000).

Dee Chester didn’t have that kind of money.

She chose to pursue space in a less expensive way.

In 2004, she filled out a job application to become an astronaut. She made it as far as an interview in Houston.

“They said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” she said.

Space proved to be as elusive as ever.

Ticket to ride

Lee Chester, Dee’s father, died in 2011. Agnes Chester, Dee’s mother, died in 2017.

They left Chester and her brother their home in Corona del Mar. It sold for $2 million, or $1 million apiece for each sibling.

Suddenly, space wasn’t so far away.

Dee Chester sent an application to VirginGalactic.com, committed to pay $200,000. Then she waited.

“Mom and Dad are extremely proud,” she said. “They’re looking down on me.”

Cook, her longtime friend, said Chester’s parents actually might have been split in their reaction.

“Her father would have been thrilled,” Cook said. “Her mother would have had a fit that she spent that kind of money.”

Cook, however, is excited. “Her whole life has been getting ready to go into space.”

The email from Virgin Galactic – the one telling her she’d been approved as a space voyager – landed in Chester’s inbox on Nov. 10, 2017 at 10:34 a.m. She knows the exact time because she kept that email. It is one of her prized possessions.

Chester was in class at the time, teaching at Hare High, a continuation school in Garden Grove.

“My kids gave me a standing ovation,” she said. “I was in tears.”

Her place in space isn’t guaranteed. The Virgin Galactic flights have yet to be approved. But she is one of more than 600 people who have bought tickets.

She hopes the program gets approved and she will be weightless as soon as next year. Each six-passenger flight is scheduled to last four hours, including 10 minutes of weightlessness.

“I’m most interested in seeing the bands of the atmosphere,” she said. “That’s space.”

Kerry Chester spent his half of the inheritance to build a music studio and make a record, “Dead Men Don’t Surf.”

He said he has watched his sister embrace her new life as a future astronaut. Most people who sign up for Virgin Galactic, he said, are “bucket listers,” meaning millionaires and billionaires with no connection to space.

“She’s not one of the beautiful, rich and famous people,” Kerry said. “She’s just someone with a dream.”