Alex McColgan

Bezos explained at the time that this was a way of preserving Earth.

By moving certain amounts of the population off the planet, it might reduce the strain on the environment.

In 2000, when Bezos was wealthy enough from the success of Amazon to start making his dreams become a reality, he began Blue Origin, funding it privately with his own money.

However, to begin with, Bezos kept the project fairly secret.

He did not reveal publicly that he had founded the company, and even in 2003 when he started buying land for a possible launch site, the public was left wondering what he wanted the land for.

Unlike Virgin Galactic, which leaned on investors to fund its research, and so was very open with its aims, Blue Origin did not make much public noise for about a decade.

It accepted a contract from NASA in 2009,

and did publish a rough report on the progress of the rocket it was developing, but it was not until 2015 that it began to speak more openly about its goals.

And those goals had not changed much from when Bezos was young.

Blue Origin's first commercial rocket, the New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space,

was also a tourism rocket.

But Bezos made it clear in speeches that he did not intend to stop there.

In his mind, this was just a beginning.

In 2016, he made a speech where he compared the space industry now with aviation back in its infant days.

In the early days of airplane flight,

A big portion of people flying were those seeking the simple thrill of flying in a plane.

This tourism and entertainment factor expanded interest in the industry, which made it so many companies developed the technology further.

Nowadays, almost anyone can buy a plane ticket.

Although spacecraft tickets are extremely expensive for now, in the long run Bezos said that the space industry could go the same way.

Bezos' rocket, the New Shepard, is a little different in design from Branson's.