Blue Origin, the rocket company Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos founded, notched one of the most substantial successes in its history on Thursday: sending a rocket to orbit.

Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth. Named after the first American to orbit Earth,

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit early Thursday, in a critical milestone that comes some 25 years after the billionaire founded the company with the goal of reducing the cost of access to space.