AHEAD OF THE CROWD. Blue Origin isn't alone in attempting to break into the space tourism market — SpaceX, Orion Span, and Axiom Space are just a few of the other companies vying for a piece of the space tourism pie. It also isn't the first company to announce the sale of tickets — Virgin Galactic began selling tickets back in 2013 at $200,000 a pop (later raised to $250,000); as of May 2017, 650 people had put down deposits. Five years later, though, and those flights haven't yet happened.
As we've seen from Virgin Galactic, selling tickets isn't necessarily an indication that a company is just about ready for take off. Still, if Blue Origin is ready to test New Shepard with passengers aboard, it must be feeling pretty confident about the craft — which means the company might just be the first to launch us into the era of commercial space travel.