The billionaire founder of Amazon.com wants you to join him in the space race.

Jeff Bezos has released the first pictures of the secret launch of his private spacecraft in a remote section of West Texas along with a plea for more staff to help him realise cheap space travel.

A video of the cone-shaped Goddard vehicle, which seems to have more in common with 1950s science fiction movies than 21st century technology, has been released on the website of the private aerospace business Blue Origin.

Along with it came the plea from Mr Bezos.

"Blue Origin wants you! Actually, Blue Origin needs you and wants to hire you … assuming you’re a hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced aerospace engineer or engineering leader. If you might be interested in joining us, please keep reading.

"We’re working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system."

The posting, with Mr Bezos’s message dated Tuesday, adds: "Slow and steady is the way to achieve results, and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along. Smaller, more frequent steps drive a faster rate of learning, help us maintain focus, and give each of us an opportunity to see our latest work fly sooner."

He said the development vehicle, named Goddard will end with "a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a suborbital journey into space."

Goddard is believed to be named after Robert Hutchings Goddard, considered the father of modern rocket propulsion for building and successfully testing in 1926 the first rocket using liquid fuel.

Alan Shepard was the first American to fly in space with a brief suborbital flight in 1961.

The Blue Origin posting is accompanied by other photos and videos from the test flight that took place in November.

"My only job at the launch was to open the champagne, and I broke the cork off in the bottle," Mr Bezos said.

"Fortunately, our other valve operations went more smoothly."

Videos also offer views and sounds from inside the test vehicle during launch and landing.

Blue Origin received FAA approval late last summer to begin its testing program.

The space-port site in one of the most sparsely populated Texas counties is on part of 165,000 acres (66,000 hectares) of desert, salt lake beds and cattle grazing land Bezos has purchased over the past several years.

Blue Origin has said the test flights will grow in duration and altitude over the next three years with as many as 52 commercial flights, the goal of the project, possibly beginning in 2010.

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