Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth of $21 billion provides him the luxury of taking on just about any hobby.

Given his love for technology — and Star Trek and Star Wars — it makes sense, then, that he would build his own space ships.

This is part of Bezos’ company, which is called Blue Origin. According to the website, the goal is to develop “technologies to enable private human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability.”

That vision is getting closer to reality. This week, Blue Origin had a successful test of an escape motor, which reached an altitude of 2,307 feet. Essentially, this provides a way to help save the lives of passengers if there is a malfunction (yes, space travel can be dicey).

The test was critical for the approval process with NASA. In fact, Blue Origin’s approach is fairly innovative and allows for reusability of the capsules.

Interestingly enough, Bezos is not the only billionaire who is chasing the space dream. Another one is Tesla‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Elon Musk, who operates SpaceX. In fact the company recently docked a capsule to the International Space Station and provided the crew with supplies.

Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog IPOPlaybook, a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of “How to Create the Next Facebook.” Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.