Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin launched the first flight of its new spaceship on Wednesday, marking a big step on the company's road to commercial spaceflight.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle launched 307,000 feet into the air Wednesday atop the company’s BE-3 rocket engine at a company facility near Van Horn, Texas, about 500 miles west of Dallas. According to Bezos, the test went well, and a video of the test shows the spacecraft floating back to Earth beneath parachutes after launch.

The New Shepard ship launches for the first time. Image: Blue Origin

“Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return,” Bezos said in a statement.

It might not be too long before you can buy a seat aboard the New Shepard for a suborbital flight to space. Blue Origin will start taking reservations for space tourism flights sometime in the near future. You can sign up for an alert that will let you know how much tickets cost and where you can reserve them when reservations become available.

The New Shepard is designed to carry six people to space, bringing passengers and science experiments more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth. People onboard would experience weightlessness and be able to see Earth out of windows that “make up a third of the capsule,” Blue Origin says.

Blue Origin's New Shepard with its parachutes deployed after a test on April 29, 2015. Image: Blue Origin

If other commercial spaceflight ventures are any indication, tickets aboard New Shepard will not be cheap. Tickets to ride on Virgin Galactic’s suborbital SpaceShipTwo are currently priced at about $250,000 a pop.

One of Blue Origin’s main goals is to create a fleet of reusable rockets that can be flown to and from space multiple times. While the New Shepard capsule came back to Earth without a problem during this test, mission controllers weren’t able to bring back a rocket booster after it launched the capsule on its flight, Bezos said. The company did not specify exactly what happened to the booster.

Blue Origin is also working on a more powerful version of its BE-3 engine to take its spacecraft higher into space for orbital flights.

Blue Origin is up against competitors such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace and other companies in the race to carry tourists to space successfully and routinely. Of the private companies, it tends to exercise more discretion, with no advanced word of the test provided to the press beforehand.

The company is just one of several ventures that Amazon's Bezos is involved with. For example, he purchased the Washington Post in 2013.