From a small town in rural England, as a teenager, I followed with awe the NASA Moon program. When I was asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?”.  My answer was to work for NASA!  I’ll describe how that teenage dream became a reality, how it led me to X-ray astronomy, to become a project scientist and leader at ESA and NASA, and to meet a lot of terrific like-minded people along the way.