Jeff Bezos is the world’s most wealthy person, and now the first to hold that title while not on the Earth. Blue Origin launched him into spaceflight history on Tuesday, with Bezos riding his company’s first crewed New Shepard rocket, alongside his brother and the oldest and youngest people to ever have flown in space. The launch marked Blue Origin’s entrance into the market of private spaceflight, joining Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Jeff Bezos said Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight on Tuesday represented one step toward the company’s mission of expanding to a point where people live and work in space.

“This is a tiny little step of what Blue Origin is going to do. What we’re really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. It’s the only way to build a road to space, and we need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future,” Bezos said.

“If you want to be a space entrepreneur today, you have to do everything from the beginning. There’s no real infrastructure that’s at an affordable cost. So that’s what we have to do, is build that kind of infrastructure and then future generations will get to rest on top of it,” Bezos added.

Bezos flew as one of the four passengers on the inaugural crew launch of its New Shepard rocket and capsule. The founder of Blue Origin, Bezos sees New Shepard as a pathfinder for his company’s other, larger scale projects.

“This suborbital tourism mission lets us practice,” Bezos said. “We need to do that over and over and over and get as good at running space vehicles as we are as a civilization at running commercial airliners.”

Beyond its space tourism rocket New Shepard, his company is also working on a massive orbital rocket called New Glenn, a stable of next-generation rocket engines, and a crewed lunar lander. Bezos emphasized that “reusable space vehicles,” like New Shepard which launches and lands, are key to Blue Origin’s goal.

Source : CNBC Television