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Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company has announced that it plans to test fly its suborbital space vehicles with humans aboard in 2017. Then if the test flights work as planned, they will fly paying space tourists starting in 2018.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/139684...y-2017.htm

Their plan is to use old-style vertical launch rockets that supposedly will land vertically as well.

If I was a passenger, it would be that landing that would scare me the most.

Here's Blue Origin's... let's say provocative looking... rocket, thrusting hard into the sky.



The crew, and later the space tourists will be in the New Shepard capsule with big picture windows, atop it.



While their plan is to make this thing cost-effective by landing the booster rocket vertically and recovering it for reuse, apparently they have decided that would be too risky for the passengers to land them that way, so the capsule will separate from the booster and return to Earth under parachutes, like the old NASA capsules.

What a great mousetrap for reducing the numbers of the elite (or at least eliminating one's potential rivals among them). Not only zeroing in on them as the ones who can afford such trips, but they're inherent risk-takers to boot.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has just completed its third successful launch and recovery test of their vertical-landing rocket booster.

So at this point, everything seems to be on schedule.

The tests are conducted in a remote part of west Texas. But the vehicles are made in MR's part of the country.

Here's Blue Origin's Seattle spaceship factory ('spaceship factory'! Love the sound of that!):