Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and three crewmates soared high above the Texas desert aboard his company Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket on Tuesday and returned to Earth, nine days after his rival Richard Branson reached the edge of space aboard a Virgin Galactic rocket plane from New Mexico.

The spacecraft ignited its BE-3 engines for liftoff from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility about 32 kilometers outside the rural town of Van Horn. The morning of the launch was cool, with mostly clear skies and few patchy clouds.

The 57-year-old American billionaire flew to the edge of space on a voyage lasting about 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

The mission was part of a fiercely competitive battle between Bezos' Blue Origin and fellow billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic to tap a potentially lucrative space tourism market Swiss bank UBS estimates will be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.

Bezos, wearing a blue flight suit and cowboy hat, and the other passengers climbed into an SUV vehicle for a short drive to the launch pad before entering a tower and getting aboard the gleaming white spacecraft with a blue feather design on its side. Each passenger rang a shiny bell before boarding the craft's capsule.

"They are in for the flight of a lifetime," Blue Origin's launch presenter Ariane Cornell said on a live webcast.

Branson got to space first, but Bezos was due to fly higher – an altitude of 100 kilometers compared to Branson's 86 km – in what experts call the world's first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew. It was Blue Origin's first crewed flight to space.

Bezos, founder of e-commerce company Amazon.com Inc., and his brother Mark Bezos, a private equity executive, were joined by two others. They were pioneering female aviator Wally Funk, 82, and recent high school graduate Oliver Daemen, 18, who become the oldest and youngest people to reach space.

The flight coincides with the anniversary of Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin's becoming the first humans to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American in space.

Funk was one of the so-called Mercury 13 group of women who trained to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s but was passed over because of her gender. Daemen, Blue Origin's first paying customer, is set to study physics and innovation management in the Netherlands. His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on-site to watch his son fly to space.

The launch was witnessed by members of the Bezos family, Blue Origin employees, and a few spectators gathered along the highway before dawn. Spectators applauded during the flight.

Minutes of weightlessness

New Shepard is an 18.3-meter-tall and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and had none of Blue Origin's staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard.

Virgin Galactic used a spaceplane with a pair of pilots on board.

New Shepard was designed to hurtle at speeds upwards of 3,540 kilometers per hour to an altitude of about 100 km on the so-called Kármán line set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.

After the capsule separates from the booster, the crew was to unbuckle for a few minutes of weightlessness. Then the capsule was due to fall back to Earth under parachutes, using a last-minute retro-thrust system that expels a "pillow of air" for a soft landing in the Texas desert.

The reusable booster had previously flown twice to space.

The launch represented another step in the race to establish a space tourism sector. Elon Musk, another billionaire tech mogul, plans to send an all-civilian crew on a several-day orbital mission on his Crew Dragon capsule in September.

On Twitter, Musk wished the Blue Origin crew "best of luck" hours before the launch.

Blue Origin aims for the first of two more passenger flights this year to happen in September or October.

It appears to have a reservoir of future customers. More than 6,000 people from at least 143 countries entered an auction to become its first paying customer. The auction winner, who made a $28 million bid, dropped out of Tuesday's flight, opening the way for Daemen. Virgin Galactic has said 600 people have booked reservations, priced at about $250,000 per ticket.

Branson said he aims ultimately to lower the price to about $40,000 per seat.

Bezos has a net worth of $206 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He stepped down as Amazon CEO this month but is still its executive chairman.

(With input from Reuters)