MOJAVE, Calif. - The old airplane hangar doors creaked, and then slowly began to roll open as Jeremy Voigt leaned into them. Stepping outside, he emerged into blazing sunshine.

Here, in California's Mojave desert, he's far from the home of the astronauts, Johnson Space Center. Yet Voigt, who has dreamed of reaching the stars his entire life, may be a lot closer to space than most NASA astronauts.

''Start it slow, and we'll work our way up," Voigt, 27, says.

He and a small team of engineers have braved the late summer heat to test a new fuel pump for a rocket engine built by XCOR, where Voigt works. The pump is crucial: too much fuel and the engine could melt. Too little and it won't reach space. The big concern today is making sure it doesn't leak.

Voigt has chosen to forge his own path to space, an ethos embodied by "new space" companies like XCOR, which have tired of waiting for NASA to unlock the final frontier.

The new space movement burns hottest in the Mojave desert, where long ago Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier above its dry, desolate expanses and early NASA astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, flew the famed X-15 to the edge of space.

Modern new space companies have set a bold goal: to open space to the floodgates of humanity. To survive, they feel, humanity must become a multi-planet species. They want to colonize the moon, Mars and beyond. And they believe they can do this by slashing the cost of spaceflight with smaller, reusable spacecraft.

For decades new space has been science fiction, inspired by such authors as Robert Heinlein, and as tangible as words on a page. But that may finally be changing. There is innovation at places like XCOR and, increasingly, money.

A generation of tech moguls who made their fortunes during the dotcom boom - like PayPal's Elon Musk, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Microsoft's Paul Allen - have come to new space. They're importing the culture of Silicon Valley and backing their ventures with deep pockets.

For half a century, of course, NASA has led America's forays into space. Its leaders view new space both warily, as a competitor, and hopefully, as a partner. Last week NASA chose two companies to bring its astronauts to the International Space Station. It gave Boeing, a long-time, traditional contractor, $4.2 billion. It gave considerably less, $2.6 billion, to SpaceX, the biggest of the new space kids on the block.

Regardless of NASA's support for new space, however, it's no longer the gatekeeper. In the minds of new space NASA had its chance in the 1970s, when building the space shuttle, to lower the cost of access to space.

''We're there again right now, where we were in the '70s," said Rick Tumlinson, an early acolyte of the new space movement who has founded a handful of companies, including the spacesuit maker, Orbital Outfitters.

The space shuttle, although it achieved much, proved far more expensive to fly than initial estimates.

''It was the Wizard of Oz," Tumlinson said. "There was nobody behind the curtain. But now it's moved outside the government. And frankly, it kind of saddens me, because no one is betting on the government to deliver the future any more."

Inspired by sci-fi, NASA

New space traces its roots to the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and Capt. James T. Kirk explored the universe for Star Fleet.

An avid reader of science fiction, Tumlinson was muddling through Stephen F. Austin University, in the Piney Woods of East Texas, when he happened to meet Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek."

Stay with your dream, Roddenberry advised, and never give up.

Decades later, Tumlinson is something of a godfather of new space, both entrepreneur and evangelist, preaching the gospel of new space icons like Musk and Bezos, whom he calls the dotcom cavalry.

''These guys grew up watching Apollo and 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,' " Tumlinson said. "Think about that time. We'd been to the moon, so we could do anything."

The tech moguls absorbed all of this as kids, says Tumlinson. "They became the geeks, and they founded the dotcoms, but inside of them there's still that little kid watching 'Star Trek' that has that dream."

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.

From Mojave to Midland

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 move 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. 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 godlike 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."

He ordered $2,000 worth of rocketry books and read spacecraft journals. At the same space conference in 1997, a businessman named Gary Hudson looking for technical managers pulled Greason aside. Would he be interested in managing propulsion for Rotary Rocket, a company building a reusable orbital spacecraft?

Would he ever. Greason moved his family to Mojave. But like a lot of startups, Rotary Rocket soon ran out of money.

''We all got laid off together," he recalls of Rotary Rocket's end in 1999.

But the team didn't want to quit. They told Greason they would continue working for free until the company's next technical milestone.

''I was very moved by that, and I went and told Gary, and he turned me down," Greason continued. "He told me he wasn't interested in developing rocket engines any more. So I was not very happy to hear that, and I had to go back and tell the crew the news. I went back to my office and continued packing up. And after about an hour I got called in by a slightly smaller group."

At this point Greason stops speaking, and when he starts again his voice is soft, breaking up. Jeff Greason, one of the most brilliant rocket scientists in the world, is trying very hard not to cry.

''They said, 'OK we're still not ready to quit, so what are you going to do, boss?' I said I didn't know, but if they all felt that way about it I would see what we could do."

Small companies, big plans

What he did was found XCOR and, for about a year, he and his small team used credit cards to buy parts. Eventually some small investors came on board.

Fifteen years later, shades of those difficult early days remain. In the corner of the company's conference room are four well-worn seats pulled from some old aircraft. Back when furniture was at a premium for the struggling company, Greason explains, the chairs were plucked from the boneyard, a final resting place for more than 1,000 abandoned aircraft on the north side of the Mojave flight line.

Since the company's beginning, XCOR has built a succession of rocket ships culminating with the Lynx, which is designed to reach space five minutes after taking off from a runway, provide a few minutes of weightlessness, and then glide back to Earth.

Just outside XCOR's conference room is the body of the 30-foot winged spacecraft. Engineers are working on it. Next to it, on the other side of the hangar, is the rocket, propelled by four main engines. More tinkering.

About 70 people now work for XCOR, up from two dozen a few years ago, as they get closer to the first flight in a year or two. Three-time NASA astronaut Rick Searfoss will be in the cockpit.

It may sound like a simple sub-orbital space plane, but the magic of the Lynx is that it would require almost no maintenance between flights, and could fly to space four times a day. Like a car, you put in gas and go. Its fuel cost is proprietary, but the liquid oxygen burned will probably cost a few thousand dollars per flight.

Larger companies with wealthier, more famous backers may get more publicity, but it is smaller ones like XCOR that embody the new space movement.

Greason envisions several versions of the Lynx, extending to orbital spaceflights and beyond. Most nights, at his home in the mountains above Mojave, he sits in his library until about midnight, thinking and planning about how to go cheaper, faster and farther.



There, a prototype of Rotary Rocket's spacecraft towers 62 feet above Legacy Park. Asked why he advises XCOR interns never to touch the spacecraft, Greason laughs heartily.

''That's a little bit of a local superstition," he said. "That everybody who has touched that thing has lost money."

It remains to be seen whether the dotcom cavalry, each with a different approach to cheaply reaching orbit, can succeed in space financially as they did in Silicon Valley.

Musk put much of the fortune he earned from the sale of PayPal into SpaceX, with the goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2020s. Bezos has spent half a billion dollars on Blue Origin, a secretive venture working on reusable launch vehicles that tests its rockets in West Texas.

''If you really want to make it so that anybody can go into space, you have to increase the safety and decrease the cost," Bezos told Wired three years ago. Microsoft's Allen backed SpaceShipOne, which made the first private flight to space a decade ago from Mojave, and has invested in Stratolaunch Systems, which is building a massive carrier aircraft to boost rockets into space.

Keeping up with SpaceX

When the new space visionaries were kids, America seemed on the cusp of opening the high frontier with the space shuttle.

In 1969 George Mueller, NASA's chief of manned spaceflight, said the shuttle would slash the cost of flying stuff to orbit down to $25 a pound. Regular folks could buy tickets into space. But the shuttle didn't come close - over the course of three decades and 135 flights, the shuttle cost closer to $25,000 a pound.

Bob Thompson, who managed the space shuttle program from its inception, in 1970, to its first flight, in 1981, knows why.

Long retired, but still passionate about the shuttle and sensitive to its critics, Thompson's home office in Clear Lake is filled with awards and shuttle models. NASA, he said, asked him to advance the U.S. human spaceflight capability. The versatile shuttle did that. He was never asked to build a low-cost launch vehicle.

''George Mueller was trying to get the Congress to give us money to build what we wanted to build," Thompson said. "He was trying to say the shuttle could do everything, answering criticism coming out of the Senate."

Of the new space companies seeking to do what NASA didn't four decades ago, none has been more successful or celebrated than SpaceX.

For good reason. There's Musk, the celebrity CEO. There's the company's stupendous rocket launches. And there are the achievements. In December 2010, SpaceX flew the first privately developed spacecraft, Dragon, into orbit and safely home. Two years ago it became the first private company to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Until then, only government agencies, like NASA, had achieved this.

Beneath the company's glossy public image there's a steelier side.

''They're demanding," says Gilberto Salinas, a Brownsville economic developer who helped persuade SpaceX to build a spaceport on Boca Chica beach, in South Texas. "We've learned that just keeping up with them is a task."

The ruthlessness of Musk and SpaceX bend toward a singular goal, to drive down the cost of access to space. And it's working.

NASA paid SpaceX a relative pittance, less than $400 million, for the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft that's now supplying the space station. NASA estimated it would have cost the space agency four to 10 times as much to do the same thing. Musk is also building a massive rocket, the Falcon 9 Heavy, which could fly three years earlier than the heavy lift rocket NASA is building, the Space Launch System, and may deliver cargo to orbit at a tenth of the cost.

For Musk, however, these are just baby steps. He, too, wants to build reusable rockets.

''What SpaceX has done so far is evolutionary, but not revolutionary," he said earlier this year.

NASA has nurtured SpaceX to date, with contracts, but the relationship has grown increasingly complex as SpaceX, as well as new space, have emerged as competitors.

Demanding workloads

The space agency feels that new space doesn't give it enough credit. Without seed funding from NASA, they say, SpaceX wouldn't exist. Without the space station, which NASA built and maintains at great expense, there's no market for the companies that fly spacecraft there. New space misses deadlines, too. And so, in years to come, NASA firmly believes it will remain the leader on the road to Mars.

''As we move farther out, we're going to need someone to fill in behind us," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in an interview earlier this year. "It's like a supply line. If the military goes somewhere, they go out and fight, win land, and put in a fuel line. Then right behind there's somebody like a Brown & Root. And they put in commercial infrastructure."

But NASA hasn't flown beyond Earth's orbit in four decades, and the space agency has no clear direction. How much longer will the children of Apollo, Heinlein and Roddenberry wait for their colonies in space?

There's a joke that at NASA five people are doing one job, but at SpaceX one person does five jobs. Like their Silicon Valley antecedents, new space employees work long hours. SpaceX was sued in August after a few hundred layoffs as plaintiffs alleged the company violated California labor laws and forced them to work "off the clock" hours. Yet most new space employees revel in demanding workloads.

Thousands of little things

This spring at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA and SpaceX staged a ceremony as the company took control of the historic launch pad from which Apollo 11 rocketed to the moon. SpaceX plans to launch its Falcon 9 Heavy, which could compete with NASA's own big rocket, from here. Officials made nice during the ceremony, but behind the scene tensions bubbled up.

The new guys, according to NASA workers, acted like they owned the place. They were "rude, arrogant egotistical smartasses," one NASA old-timer said. "I don't mind young people, which they all were. But they just acted like they had it all figured out, like they just have the world by the tail."

The kids in Mojave are still trying to figure it out.

Voigt and his young XCOR companions had toiled into the evening. They had wired the pump into the guts of the rocket, and for hours they had tested. Still the pump leaked.

While this is but a single pump, it's emblematic of the challenge facing new space. For a rocket to fly, thousands of little things must go just right. For space to be affordable, these little things must go right thousands of times between checkups. New space can't afford the hundreds of engineers and technicians who spent months checking out the space shuttle between flights.

Finally, Voigt called a halt.

''I think we're just wasting time," he said, sighing.

As the sun fell behind the Tehachapi Mountains, the engineers and technicians packed up their gear and slowly rolled the rocket back into the hangar. Another long day. Another late night. But they would be back in the morning. There are always problems with new hardware. No test is a failure. You learn. You apply.

And if you're working for Jeff Greason, you don't give up.

''This is not optional for me," Greason said, gazing toward the corner of the conference room with the old aircraft seats. "I believe humanity opening up a frontier in space is important. I think if we want to have a future, we have to do it. As soon as I see other people doing it in a way that I think will work, I can stop.

''So far, I don't. So I can't."