After much talk and a few false starts, the age of space tourism is finally upon with both Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson preparing for space flights this month

Is space on the green list?

It is if you’re a billionaire. Amazon founder Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, owns Blue Origin, which although it sounds like an aftershave brand is in fact a space company with a reusable launch vehicle called New Shepard. It heads into space for its first manned flight on July 20 and one seat on it was recently auctioned online. Over 7600 people registered, bids came from 159 countries and the winner paid a cool $28 million (£20 million) for the honour. They will join Bezos and his brother Mark in the capsule where they probably won’t be sipping warm white wine and eating mini-tubes of Pringles.

Where do they leave from?

The launch site is in West Texas, where Blue Origin has its space-port. Bezos also has New Glenn in the pipeline, an orbital reusable launch vehicle that will “build the road into space”, and Blue Moon, a lander capable of delivering payloads to the lunar surface. If you know your space history you’ll know that Shepard and Glenn are named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the third American in space and later a United States Senator. Glenn returned to space, aged 77, in 1998, making him also the oldest astronaut ever. So far anyway …

Meaning?

Meet Wally Funk, a space obsessive who has spent six decades trying to leave the earth’s orbit by one means or another. An 82-year-old former flight instructor with a string of firsts to her name, she volunteered for and was trained in America’s Women In Space programme in way back 1961, but despite finishing top of her class she never made it because Nasa cancelled the project. Bezos picked her to occupy the final seat on board New Shepard. The online clip in which he can be seen giving her the good news has been viewed over 700,000 times. Needless to say, she looks pleased.

Go Wally! And Richard Branson?

Branson, of course, has long harboured dreams of space flight. He founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 and had hoped to be in orbit by 2009. Setbacks both technical and financial put paid to that dream. On July 11, however, he will go up in the snappily-named SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity. It will be the ship’s 22nd flight but only its fourth with a crew. If everything goes to plan, he’ll be offering commercial trips next year at a cost of £175,000, far from the £20 million paid by Bezos’s mystery astronaut but not exactly small change either.