Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos speaks in front of his company's New Shepard suborbital vehicle on display at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs April 5. Bezos said the company still plans to start flying people on suborbital space tourism flights by the end of 2018, although the company has yet to start selling tickets or even setting a ticket price. Development of New Shepard, he said, is informing the company's plans for an orbital launch vehicle, New Glenn, that will use the same BE-4 engines that United Launch Alliance is considering for its Vulcan rocket.

As Blue Origin prepares to start flying people on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle, the company’s founder says the altitude the vehicle can reach will put it at an advantage over Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...