Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, and three crewmates soared high above the Texas desert aboard his space venture Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle on Tuesday and returned to Earth, a historic suborbital flight that helps to inaugurate a new era of private commercial space tourism.

The spacecraft ignited its BE-3 engines for a liftoff from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility about 20 miles outside the rural town of Van Horn. There were generally clear skies with a few patchy clouds on a cool morning for the launch.

The 57-year-old American billionaire flew on a voyage lasting about 10 minutes and 20 seconds to the edge of space, nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic's successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.

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 the Swiss bank UBS estimates will be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.