The battle of the billionaires between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson looks set to finally blast its first passengers into space next year.

The battle of the billionaires between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson looks set to finally blast its first passengers into space next year. Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, Blue Origin Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson said'we plan to start flying our first test passengers soon.' He added'we expect to start selling tickets in 2019,' although the firm is yet to say how much flights will cost. Blue Origin, the space tourism firm owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has successfully flown its reusable space tourism passenger capsule for the first time. Even Jeff Bezos has refused to reveal the cost of a ticket.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has confirmed that his Blue Origin space-tourism venture will launch a crewed mission sometime in 2019. The revelation was made today at the Air Force Association's Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Washington, DC. The comments from the 54-year-old multi-billionaire further fuel the commercial space race as several private companies jostle to become the first to send paying customers into space. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is worth an estimated $159 billion – making him the wealthiest man on the planet – and is using part of this vast fortune to bankroll Blue Origin. SpaceX founder and commercial space-flight trailblazer Elon Musk announced earlier this week that Japanese billionaire and fashion designer Yusaku Maezawa is the first customer to sign-up for a trip around the moon.

Jeff Bezos' space company is in the conceptual design phase of a large lunar lander that it says will provide reusable access to the moon's surface and its resources, Blue Origin said on Wednesday. The lander is part of Blue Origin's broader mission of enabling a future in which millions of people live and work in space, the company said. 'The next logical step in this path is a return to the Moon,' Blue Origin said in a statement. 'The next logical step in this path is a return to the Moon,' Blue Origin said in a statement. It confirmed it was in the'conceptual design phase' of the lander development.

Blue Origin founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has claimed there will one day be a trillion humans in the solar system. The Amazon founder hopes his space firm will help populate other planets. 'I won't be alive to see the fulfillment of that long-term mission,' Bezos said at the Wired 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco. 'We are starting to bump up against the absolute true fact that Earth is finite,' he warned'We are starting to bump up against the absolute true fact that Earth is finite' Blue Origin founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Wired 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco Blue Origin's aim is to lower the cost of access to space, Bezos said, and he revealed he will spend a'little more' than $1 billion next year to support the firm. 'The dynamism that I have seen over the last 20 years in the internet where incredible things have happened in really short periods of time,' Bezos said.