John Rost was all smiles as he climbed down from the cockpit of an F-104 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center last week. Just 30 minutes before, I had watched Rost and his instructor, former Italian Air Force pilot Piercarlo Ciacchi, taxi down the same runway that hosted space shuttle landings less than a decade before. After idling for a moment, the blue-and-white checkered jet exploded down the runway and went screaming into the restricted airspace around Kennedy. 

Rost is the first pilot in a fledgling commercial astronaut training program run by Starfighters Inc., and this was his fourth flight.

"That was fucking awesome," Rost, an amateur pilot who is the CEO of Fiesta Auto Insurance when he's not training to be an astronaut, said when we spoke after his flight. "It's just like being on a spaceship. Driving into Kennedy Space Center, flying around and seeing all the launch pads, the Vehicle Assembly Building—you feel like you're Neil Armstrong."