When the auction winner, who remains anonymous, decided to skip the first flight and take the ride later, Blue Origin contacted Mr. Daemen, one of the people who had a ticket for the second flight.
Blue Origin has declined to say what the price is or how many people have signed up, but a spokesman says there is a strong demand.
Yet Mr. Bezos has always had ambitions much grander than space tourism. And Blue Origin’s accomplishments pale next to the rocket company led by another of the world’s richest people: SpaceX, which Mr. Musk founded a couple of years after Blue Origin started.
SpaceX is already a behemoth in the space business. It regularly takes NASA astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, it has already deployed more than 1,500 satellites in its Starlink constellation to provide internet service everywhere, and it is developing a gargantuan rocket called Starship for missions for Mars and elsewhere.
Blue Origin’s projects do not seem poised to upend the space industry the way SpaceX has.
New Glenn, a larger reusable rocket for launching satellites, is still more than a year away, and efforts to win major government contracts like launching Department of Defense satellites have so far come up empty. A lunar lander that Blue Origin hopes NASA will someday use to carry astronauts was not selected, at least for the moment, because NASA said it had money for only one design — SpaceX’s.
Blue Origin’s mascot is the tortoise. As in the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” perhaps with steady, constant effort, Blue Origin can catch up.
Lori Garver, deputy administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, recalled Mr. Bezos going to Washington to meet with her and Charles Bolden, the administrator. At the time, Blue Origin was an enigma.