Blue Origin vehicle test launch day, west Texas, November 13, 2006. Courtesy Blue Origin.

After years of silence, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ project to take paying customers into space is providing a glimpse of its plans, amid growing interest from NASA in working with private space contractors.

In recent weeks, the Bezos company, Blue Origin LLC, announced it’s chosen three scientific payloads to take on test flights of its rocket-propelled vehicle, New Shepard. A consultant for the company indicated it’s interested in working with a newly announced NASA program on suborbital research. And Blue Origin has pushed legislation in Texas, where it has a launch facility, creating liability provisions for “space flight entities.”

The new developments suggest Blue Origin may gearing up for new test flights and gaining enough confidence in its technology to seek out a partnership with the U.S. space agency, though the company hasn’t given an exact timeline for future launches.

Blue Origin is part of a new class of private startups — several of them founded by technology moguls — that are getting into the commercial space business. Often mocked as vanity projects, these companies have begun to be taken more seriously amid strong signals from NASA that they could play a future role in the U.S. space program.

The Obama administration has been looking at outsourcing elements of the U.S. space program to private contractors as a way to save money. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, in a recent speech, included Blue Origin in a list of “exciting” companies and said the agency is “devising ways” to work with them.

To be sure, there is still a veil of secrecy surrounding Blue Origin, which has its main operations in the Seattle suburb of Kent. A spokeswoman for Blue Origin declined a request for an interview. In Van Horn, Texas, site of the Blue Origin launch facility, local officials and others say the company has tightly controlled information about its activities.

But Blue Origin may be feeling some pressure as rivals step up their efforts. British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic, unveiled its first tourist space ship in California’s Mojave Desert this week. A company called Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), which is headed by PayPal co-founder and Tesla chairman Elon Musk, has a contract to transport supplies to the International Space Station.

Blue Origin describes New Shepard as “a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a suborbital journey into space.” Suborbital refers to space flights that enter space but do not reach orbit level and eventually return to the ground.

Jeff Bezos opens champagne at Blue Origin test launch, west Texas, Nov. 2006. Courtesy Blue Origin.

As described by Blue Origin on its website, New Shepard will take off and accelerate for roughly two and a half minutes “before shutting off its rocket engines and coasting into space.” The crew capsule will then separate from the propulsion module and the two will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and “land for re-use.” The crew capsule will land with the help of a parachute.

Blue Origin says “flight opportunities” for unmanned scientific experiments may be available in 2011 and for astronauts in 2012. The company conducted at least one flight test in November 2006, attended by Bezos.

Blue Origin recently selected three scientific projects — from Purdue University, the University of Central Florida and Louisiana University — for future test flights, though it didn’t specify when the flights would take place. The company will likely respond to a Dec. 4 NASA request for suborbital space flight companies interested in working with the agency on research programs, said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and former NASA official now consulting for Blue Origin.

“If NASA is soliciting, I expect we would be interested in responding to that solicitation,” Stern said. He added that the company could also potentially partner on research with the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies.

“This is going to be much broader than just NASA,” Stern said.

The Blue Origin-inspired bills on liability for space flight companies didn’t pass in Texas this year, and the next state legislative session isn’t until Jan. 2011. Meantime, there’s little clue as to what’s going on at the company’s launch site in west Texas, local residents say.

Bezos visits “about once every three or four months,” said Larry Simpson, who is publisher and editor of the local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, as well as a fuel supplier at the local airport.

The Amazon CEO last made an appearance around Thanksgiving, Simpson said, arriving at the local Culberson County Airport in a corporate jet and quickly speeding away with a security contingent.