Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' suborbital spaceflight project, Blue Origin, seems to be on track. Test flights of the New Shepard prototype vehicle have been underway at the company's West Texas launch site since 2005, and Blue Origin expects to be offering flights dedicated to experiments from outside researchers starting in 2011, with flights requiring a human onboard beginning in 2012. At some point, the company plans to offer suborbital flights to space tourists.
New Shepard launches vertically, lands under a parachute, and is designed to be re-used many times. NASA is encouraging the development of such craft by private industry by working to identify experiments that could profitably by carried out on suborbital flights.
A few companies are now aiming to have suborbital craft in operation within the next three to five years. The odds of at least one of them succeeding might, therefore, be reasonably good. The big prize, however, will go to the builder of the first reliable and reusable private orbital ship.
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