Blue Origin now has a rocket nearly in one piece as it mated the first and second stages this week of what will be the first ever New Glenn launch from Cape Canaveral.

Jeff Bezos | Smithsonian Magazine’s 2016 American Ingenuity Award Winner for Technology The Princeton-educated Amazon founder, Washington Post owner and new-economy pioneer also helms an innovative spaceflight company, Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000. This year it became the first aerospace manufacturer to launch, land and relaunch a rocket into space—an essential leap toward our extraterrestrial future. Bezos aims to revolutionize travel and work in space by making spaceflight so inexpensive that entrepreneurs will rush to create new businesses that have not even been imagined yet. Blue Origin’s achievement has been described as comparable to the shift from the sail to the steam engine. Read more about Bezos’ work: http://smithmag.co/GICDO2 | #IngenuityAwards And more about the American Ingenuity Awards: http://smithmag.co/77xPqy

No one had ever launched, landed and relaunched a rocket into space until the company's historic achievement.

Two weeks before he died, the legendary astronaut wrote a letter in recognition of Jeff Bezos' work, read at the 2016 American Ingenuity Awards Smithsonian magazine American #IngenuityAwards

Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world’s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Gopi Thotakura was selected as one of the six crew members for the mission

SERA’s mission is to democratise space access and empower global participation in space exploration

The two companies, plus the space firm Dynetics, will share $967 million from the space agency.

NASA on Thursday selected space firms SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to build lunar landing systems that can carry astronauts to the moon by 2024, the White House's accelerated deadline under the space agency's moon-to-Mars campaign. Jillian Kitchener has more.

((This April 30 story has been corrected to say Starship can carry more than 100 metric tonnes of cargo, not 100 pounds in paragraph 9. The error occurred in a previous version as well.))

NASA has selected teams led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX to develop lunar landing systems capable of putting astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024. "We want to be able to go to the moon, but we want to be a customer," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters today during a teleconference. "We want to drive down the costs, we want to increase the access, we want to have our partners have customers that are not just us, so they compete on cost and innovation, and just bring capabilities that we've never had before." Fixed-price contracts totaling… Read More

NASA 's Artemis mission has turned into a space race between billionaires, as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have been chosen to develop human landing systems for mission.

On stage, Bezos took the wraps off a massive model of what will be the firm's first lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon. The event kicked off at 4 p.m. in Washington D.C, and was not live streamed.

Boeing Co, the aerospace company also submitted its concept for a lunar lander last year but it was not selected.

Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin selected by NASA to b...

The three companies, which include firms of tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, will share $967 million from NASA, though specific amounts each company will receive were not immediately known.