KENT, Wash. — The headquarters of Blue Origin, the secretive rocket company in an industrial park here, is anonymous, with not even a sign at the road to announce the occupants.

On Tuesday, for the first time, Blue Origin, started by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, opened its doors to reporters.

“Welcome to Blue,” Mr. Bezos said. “Thank you for coming.”

Blue Origin is part of a shift of the space business from NASA and aerospace behemoths like Lockheed Martin toward private industry, especially smaller entrepreneurial companies. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, founded by another Internet entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has been the most visible and most successful of the new generation of rocket companies. Last Friday, it launched another satellite to orbit, but an attempt to land the booster on a floating platform again ended in an explosion.

Much more quietly, Blue Origin has also had big space dreams, but until now did not give outsiders a look at what it was doing.