When your hairdresser or barber asks if you are going anywhere nice for your holidays, perhaps you can soon say Mars or Venus rather than Mallorca or Ibiza.

Saturday, July 20, marks the 50th anniversary of when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched Apollo 11 down on the moon. Six hours later, Armstrong took one small step for (a) man.

Now, five decades later, famous billionaires are backing different projects to make space a viable destination for anyone willing to go a little further than the local beach.

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos might have gotten a very expensive divorce recently, but most estimates still put him as the richest man in the world.

His deep pockets help fund independent space venture, Blue Origin, which is building a rocket with a passenger capsule housing six seats and large windows to view the curvature of the Earth.

Anyone can reserve a seat on the website already, although actual take-off dates have yet to be announced and prices aren't known.

Meanwhile the U.K.'s own Richard Branson has gone a step further, already selling 600 tickets at a cool $250,000 a pop. In February, Branson's VSS Unity ship made it into space, defined as 100 kilometres above Earth.