Amazon Founder Joins Budget Space Race

As the founder of the internet bookstore amazon.com, Jeff Bezos made a fortune selling cheaply to the online masses. Now the dotcom billionaire has embarked on another pioneering venture - to bring low-cost space travel into public reach.

The prototype of his extraordinary new spacecraft made a successful test launch and landing in the Texas desert, according to a video released yesterday on his website, paving the way for commercial flights into space as early as 2010.

The conical capsule - which Mr Bezos named Goddard in honour of Robert Goddard, the so-called "father of modern rocketry" - looks more like a relic from 1950s sci-fi television series Buck Rogers than a cutting-edge spacecraft for the 21st century. Yet it still managed an altitude of 90 metres (285ft) before making a controlled landing 25 seconds later.

"The launch was both useful and fun," Mr Bezos said in a statement on his seven-year-old aerospace company's website, blueorigin.com. "We're working patiently and step by step to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system."

The launch took place on November 13. Mr Bezos has kept details of the Blue Origin project under wraps to avoid giving away secrets to his rival entrepreneurs in space tourism, among them Virgin's Richard Branson.

The company has also not revealed how much it expects to charge for orbital flights or how long they will last, or given details of the capsule, which photographs show was driven to and from the launchpad on the back of an articulated lorry.

But the release of the video, along with a recruitment pitch for rocket scientists, engineers and anyone with experience of space industries, proves that Mr Bezos is intent on becoming a major player in the privately-funded race for space.

Mr Branson's Virgin Galactic is already taking bookings for $200,000 flights into space it intends starting in 2009, and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, is behind Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize for making two trips into space in 2004.

Mr Bezos would not say when he planned his next launch but said his company would move forward under the company's motto gradatim ferociter (step by step, courageously). "Slow and steady is the way to achieve results and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along," he said.

"Smaller, more frequent steps drive a faster rate of learning, help us maintain focus, and give each of us an opportunity to see our latest work fly sooner."