Topic summary
Commercial spaceflight
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Private spaceflight.
History of commercial space transportation
The history of full private space transportation includes early efforts by German company OTRAG in the 20th century. Founded in 1975 as the first private company to attempt to launch a private spacecraft, testing of its OTRAG rocket began in 1977. The history also covers numerous modern orbital and suborbital launch systems in the 21st century. More recent commercial spaceflight projects include the suborbital flights of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, the orbital flights of SpaceX and other COTS participants.