The thickly coiffed Sy Sperling gained a measure of fame as the founder of the Hair Club for Men in the 1980s and 1990s with commercials that reminded viewers he wasn’t just the president of the company, he was “also a client.” For Jeff Bezos, it’s much the same. No, the close-shaven, balding-pate Bezos decidedly isn’t a member of the hair club. Rather, he’s not just the founder of Blue Origin, he also intends to fly into space aboard its New Shepard spacecraft.

And is he ever excited about this. Oh yes. This week, while pointing out the large windows in the New Shepard on the floor of his rocket factory, Bezos talked expansively about what it would be like to ride into space aboard the vehicle for the first time. The seats recline, he explained, with each of the six inside the spacecraft facing its own window.

But the spacecraft won’t just offer a room with a view. Passengers will feel the effect of rocketing into space. During ascent, passengers will experience 3 to 4Gs, and up to 5Gs during descent, although the maximum g-forces will last only for about 10 seconds.

“The fun thing about ascent is the accelerating acceleration,” he said. “Basically you have more than 100,000 pounds of thrust from the BE-3 engine, and when you start out there’s a lot of propellant on board, and so you’re accelerating fairly slowly. But as you burn off the propellant, the vehicle gets very light and the thrust stays the same. So the acceleration increases.”

This differentiates New Shepard from its primary competitors, Virgin Galactic and XCOR, which are also developing suborbital space-tourism systems. While both of these vehicles will be powered by rocket engines, the fundamental architecture more closely resembles a high-flying airplane than a traditional rocket and space capsule.

The details about New Shepard’s historic flight in November 2015, in which the spacecraft and propulsion module performed the first vertical takeoff of a rocket to reach space and subsequently land, offer some insight into what the ride will be like. That vehicle’s flight time was 10 minutes and 20 seconds, rising to 100.5km. It spent 171.1 seconds in microgravity. The propulsion module and spacecraft will separate, of course, with the rocket landing vertically and the crew capsule parachuting back.

During a tour of the Blue Origin factory, Bezos took pains to emphasize the safety of the New Shepard system. The vehicle is fully autonomous and fully reusable. Therefore it is relatively inexpensive to test the launch-and-return system many times before putting humans on board.

“One of the great things about the architecture is that we can fly it until we have so much confidence,” he explained. “We’ll test the ever-living daylights out of the vehicle before ever putting a human on it. By the time anyone gets on, I think you should be willing to bring your mom and your kids.”

Bezos said the uncrewed test program will continue this year, with test pilots possibly riding the vehicle next year. However, he said, “test passengers” might be a better word because New Shepard will remain fully autonomous for the duration of its flight. Even during commercial flights, no pilot or professional astronaut would be on board. These test passengers would provide information about noise, uncomfortable acceleration, or other aspects of flight to help Blue Origin finalize a flight profile for commercial flights.

When would he go? “As soon as possible,” Bezos said.

That might mean being a test passenger as soon as 2017. Bezos said he has always wanted to go to space, but that hasn’t been his primary motivation in founding a rocket company. “Yes, I do want to go to space, but I want to do it on Blue Origin vehicles. You can buy Soyuz seats, it’s not what drives me. I want to change the whole cost structure of accessing space. But yes, I do want to go, and I will go.”

If test flights continue to go well, Blue Origin could begin commercial service from West Texas as early as 2018. The company has not settled on a price, Bezos said, but he expects it will be competitive with “the kinds of prices you see.” Virgin Galactic is charging passengers $250,000 for flights on its VSS Unity spacecraft, and XCOR is charging $150,000 for flights on its Lynx spacecraft. Neither vehicle has undergone test flights into space yet, however.

Blue Origin is being more cautious with tickets. Bezos said he doesn’t want to sell rides to customers until he can give them a fairly concrete idea of when they’ll be able to go into space. Still, “many thousands” of people have joined a list of those interested in buying tickets when they become available.

And what of Amazon Prime members? Does a ride to space come with membership? Asked this, Bezos bellowed out laughing. “Maybe we’ll limit initial sales to prime members,” he said. “That’s a good idea.”