Big guns are getting cocky about space travel: the next frontier?

On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos officially joined the billionaire race to space. The 10-minute, 10-second suborbital flight aboard the New Shepard rocket was a milestone for Blue Origin, Bezos’s private spaceflight company, and the company’s first effort towards making space tourism viable.

Bezos was joined by his brother, Mark Bezos; 82-year-old Wally Funk, a former test pilot who paved the way for women to qualify for Nasa’s astronaut corps; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old who secured a spot on the second planned flight but was offered this spot to replace the anonymous winner of a public auction who bid $28m but decided to sit out the flight due to “scheduling conflicts”. With this flight, Funk became the oldest person to travel to space and Daemen, a soon-to-be physics student, the youngest.

In a post-flight interview with US television channel MSNBC, Bezos said he also has an environmental vision for paving the way to space. “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry and move it into space, and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.

“It’s going to take decades and decades to achieve, but you have to start, and big things start with small steps ... That’s what this suborbital tourism mission allows us to do, to practise over and over.”

The flight followed hot on the heels of Richard Branson’s own 59-minute suborbital flight into space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity on July 11. Branson was one of six employees from Virgin Galactic, the space company he founded in 2004 with the goal of making space travel possible for tourists who took to the sky.

Branson became the first person to travel into space on a self-funded spacecraft and, according to a press statement, his role aboard the VSS Unity was to “evaluate the private astronaut experience”.

“We’re here to make space more accessible to all,” Branson said as he was presented with astronaut wings, a badge awarded to those who have performed a successful space flight.

Completing the trio of billionaires in a race to space is Elon Musk, who has slightly loftier ideas. Last year, the SA-born billionaire and founder of SpaceX said he had hopes of establishing a city of a million people on Mars by 2050.

For now, both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic plan on expanding operations to make available space flights to high-paying customers with a taste for space tourism.

Blue Origin has plans to launch two more passenger flights this year, but ticket prices have not been confirmed.

In 2014 flights aboard Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft were set at $250,000, or R3.6m. When passenger flights open to the public within the next year, you can likely expect this price to increase.

Those whose pockets do not run quite so deep can enter to win two seats aboard one of the first Virgin Galactic commercial space flights in an effort to raise funds for Space for Humanity, a nonprofit organisation with a mission to expand access to space for all of humanity.

The competition closes on September 1 2021 and the winners will be announced at the end of the month. To see if you are eligible to enter, visit here.