Jeff Bezos launching to space with Blue Origin, pursuing dream "step by step, ferociously"

Nine days after being upstaged by Richard Branson, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is finally ready for his own flight into history, blasting off Tuesday morning aboard a fully automated spacecraft he believes will usher in a new era of commercial passenger service.

Reaching a slightly higher altitude than Branson's winged spaceplane, Bezos' New Shepard capsule is equipped with the largest windows ever built into a spacecraft, offering its briefly weightless passengers truly out-of-this-world views of planet Earth more than 62 miles below. More important for the safety-conscious, perhaps, the capsule features a flight-tested abort system designed to quickly propel the ship and its passengers away from a malfunctioning booster.