Billionaire space race the 2016 International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson elaborated on the Bezos vision previously outlined in the New Glenn announcement. The Blue Origin New Armstrong would be similar in function to the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System that Elon Musk unveiled at the same conference. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are in the same market, suborbital space tourism, with New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo (Tier 1b), respectively. They are in a race to be first to launch paying customers on short spaceshots, with rival technological philosophies of space capsules and spaceplanes, respectively Virgin Galactic and SpaceX support
Space tourism fly on Soyuz TMA-14 in March 2009. British-American Richard Garriott became the next space tourist in October 2008 aboard Soyuz TMA-14. As of 2018, Canadian Guy Laliberté is the most recent tourism to fly to the ISS, in September 2009 aboard Soyuz TMA-16. Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, Soyuz once again became the only means of accessing the ISS, and so tourism was once again put on hold. Bigelow Aerospace acquired the designs for inflatable space habitats from NASA's Transhab program, and has already launched two first inflatable habitat modules. The first, named Genesis I, was launched