One engineer installed a GoPro camera on his rocket; he showed Ormerod pictures it had captured high in the sky. Others get creative -- one rocket is shaped like a bottle of Jagermeister. From the control center comes a countdown: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The rockets blast off, then gently float back to Earth under parachutes -- if they don't malfunction.

Ormerod was into astronauts and science fiction as a kid but never imagined being able to travel beyond Earth. "When only a tiny percentage of people can go to space, what does everyone else who dreams of it do?" he wondered. Then, at a rocket launch in his native Scotland, he found the answer: They live their interstellar dreams on the ground. Soon he was following scientists to a Mars simulation in Utah and aurora hunters to the otherworldly coast of Iceland. Next he'll visit crop circle enthusiasts in Russia and astronomers in South Africa. "They're ordinary people," Ormerod says, "but they're blasting into outer space."