Twenty years after founding Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos celebrates New Shepard’s first crewed flight in July 2021 by breaking out the bubbly. Credit: Blue Origin

After an extended launch delay, suborbital space tourism is finally ready for liftoff. Many in the industry thought that was the case nearly 17 years ago, when SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites and funded by billionaire Paul Allen, won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE. Around the same time, Virgin Galactic announced a deal to license the technology, proposing to start flying people in 2007 or 2008.

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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...