This month, Jeff Bezos became the second billionaire to reach the edge of space, and he did so aboard a rocket manufactured by a business he founded.

Amazon's founder, who stepped down as CEO earlier this month, took off early Tuesday, June 19, with three crewmates on the maiden flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle.

Riding with Bezos on the planned 11-minute flight were brother Mark Bezos as well as the oldest and youngest people ever to fly into space – 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, 18, a physics student. Daemen, whose seat was paid for by his father, Joes Daemen, CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, was put on the crew after the winner of an anonymous $28 million auction for the flight had to postpone due to a scheduling conflict.

Bragging rights over Branson

New Shepard's suborbital flight was designed to take the crew past the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, at nearly 330,000 feet, or roughly 62 miles above the Earth. That will give Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin — which he founded in 2000 — bragging rights over Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, whose flight this month aboard SpaceShipTwo hit a peak altitude of around 282,000 feet, surpassing NASA's designated Earth-space boundary of 50 miles, but falling well short of the Kármán line.

Blue Origin vs. Virgin Galactic

Aside from the altitude, the New Shepard launch differed from Branson's July 11 trip in several ways: instead of taking off from a pad, the Virgin Galactic spacecraft was dropped from under a specially designed aircraft at around 50,000 feet before activating its ascension engines. The Virgin Galactic ship also glided back to Earth for a runway touchdown similar to that of a space shuttle.

The 60-foot-tall New Shepard, on the other hand, launched like a conventional rocket, and its capsule was planned to return home dangling from three parachutes, akin to NASA's human spaceflights of the 1960s and 1970s. Its booster, however, returned to the pad for a soft touchdown so that it could be reused later. And the capsule, with Bezos and his crewmates aboard, came back to the high plains of Texas using braking rockets, instead of splashing down at sea.

New Shepard, which is fully autonomous, is named after Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American into space.

Elon Musk has hasn't made it to space, but his company has

With Bezos' flight complete, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, is left as the odd man out in the billionaire space race. Even so, Musk's SpaceX, which has flown astronauts to the International Space Station, is a heavyweight in the commercial space business compared with either Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin.

Branson and Bezos are trying to capitalize on the potentially lucrative market for space tourism, whereas Musk is more concerned with collaborating with NASA, gaining market dominance in the satellite launch industry, and realizing his dream of sending humans to Mars.