In the race of three billionaires, Jeff Bezos faces his first space flight on the anniversary of the moon landing.
The founder of Amazon wanted to launch from the desert in west Texas to the edge of space on Tuesday.
The shuttle should take off in the afternoon.
Its eleven minute flight should take it up to an altitude of 100 kilometers.
Bezos' space shuttle Blue Origin is said to reach a greater height than the Virgin Galactic aircraft, with which British billionaire Richard Branson undertook a test flight into space nine days ago.
The third billionaire who wants to offer private travel to space is Tesla boss Elon Musk.
Bezos will be accompanied by 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old high school graduate Oliver Daemen, who will be the oldest and youngest person in space. "I'm excited, but not afraid," Bezos told Fox Business on Monday. "We are ready. The vehicle is ready." On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin were the first people to set foot on the moon. Funk belonged to a group of women who had completed astronaut training in the early 1960s but were not selected for a flight into space because of their gender. Daemen is Blue Origin's first paying customer.
Immediately before his first space flight, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had contested a competition between the super-rich for the premiere in space.
There is already a first person in space, said the 57-year-old multi-billionaire on Monday the US broadcaster NBC.
This is "Yuri Gagarin - and that was a long time ago".
He was referring to the historic flight of the Soviet cosmonaut in April 1961.
Bezos adds that his flight is “not a competition”: it is more about “building a path into space so that future generations can do incredible things in space”.
Nine days before Bezos, the British billionaire Richard Branson had successfully fulfilled his dream of flying in weightlessness. However, his space plane "VSS Unity" did not reach the Kármán line, which is 100 kilometers above sea level and which, according to international definition, marks the boundary to space. Bezos now wants to fly around 15 kilometers higher than his rival Branson and thus reach space according to the international definition.