Another private space company known as Blue Origin is now aiming to launch their first manned mission in 2017 according to CEO Jeff Bezos last Tuesday during a tour of the company's research and development site near Seattle.

He adds how these first people who will ride with Blue Origin will not be paying customers, however, thousands are already willing to pay for a trip to lower Earth orbit. 

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Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder of Amazon, is now spending billions he earned from his successful online retailer to invest in high tech equipment and some 600 employees to work inside this former Boeing airplane parts facility. Bezos believes that this company is a vision that can soon become profitable in the future, especially when it comes to human spaceflight.

However, it is still too early to tell whether those thousands are interested in space travel will return as sales. The company was founded in 2000 where it already launched a spacecraft twice and landed back safely. To date, the company plans to continue testing their spacecraft before they launch something that will be safe for human spaceflight.

Bezos reveals how Blue Origin can rake in the money when they sell rocket engines to those who plan to launch satellites and spacecraft. For example, United Launch Alliance already requested for Blue Origin to build a new engine for its upcoming space vehicle in order to replace their Russian manufactured engines.

During this recent media tour, Bezos explained that he is truly enthusiastic about Blue Origin's projects where he visits the Kent facility, 17 miles out of Seattle alongside with his day job at Amazon. He also shared technical details with the help of an engineer during the media tour.

Bezos adds how he only pursues things that he is only passionate about, as space travel was one of is childhood dreams. When asked about how much he invested in this space venture, he replied that he was not ready to share the exact figure, but he just said that it can add up to a "very significant number". During the media tour, only a few photographs of the facility were allowed to be taken.

To date, there are a handful of U.S. private space companies such as SpaceX and U.K.'s Virgin Galactic that are in the space race to build the next generation rockets and spacecrafts for space tourism and the first manned mission to Mars, but Bezos remains unfazed.

He says that his goal was not to become the first private commercial space company to offer space tourism to the public but his real goal lies in producing technology that can launch as many as 100 suborbital flights in a year where safety would be their main focus.