{"id":17518,"date":"2021-07-19T19:33:52","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T11:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/blue-origins-space-shots-give-tiny-texas-town-a-boost-thats-bigger-than-expected\/"},"modified":"2021-07-19T19:33:52","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T11:33:52","slug":"blue-origins-space-shots-give-tiny-texas-town-a-boost-thats-bigger-than-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/blue-origins-space-shots-give-tiny-texas-town-a-boost-thats-bigger-than-expected\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Origin\u2019s space shots give tiny Texas town a boost that\u2019s bigger than expected"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Van
A mural painted on a vacant building in Van Horn, Texas, features Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, who are due to ride Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital spaceship on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

VAN HORN, Texas \u2014 When I last visited this West Texas town in 2006, Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture was planning to provide suborbital space trips for paying passengers by 2010.<\/p>\n

The bad news for Van Horn is that it\u2019s taken a decade longer than expected for Blue Origin\u2019s space boom to come to town. But the good news is that the economic impact is arguably 10 times as great.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin\u2019s 15-year-old environmental assessment, which was the subject of the Federal Aviation Administration hearing I attended in 2006, estimated that 20 to 35 full-time employees would be working at the company\u2019s suborbital launch site a half-hour drive north of Van Horn.<\/p>\n

Fifteen years later, the actual figure is 275 employees \u2014 due not only to Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, which Bezos and three crewmates are scheduled to ride on Tuesday, but also due to the rocket engine testing program that\u2019s based at Launch Site One.<\/p>\n

The BE-3 engines that are used on New Shepard are built at Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters in Kent, Wash., but they\u2019re put through their paces in Texas. Launch Site One is also the test site for Blue Origin\u2019s more powerful BE-4 rocket engines.<\/p>\n

\"New
Patricia Golden, director of Van Horn\u2019s Clark Hotel Museum, shows off a scale model of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Blue Origin\u2019s West Texas workforce makes up just a fraction of Blue Origin\u2019s total employee count of more than 3,500 people. Nevertheless, 275 relatively high-paying jobs have an impact on Van Horn\u2019s 1,900 residents, and more widely on Culberson County. \u201cThey\u2019re one of the larger taxpayers in the county \u2014 not just the city, but the county,\u201d Van Horn Mayor Becky Brewster told me.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s before Blue Origin started flying actual passengers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what the history-making moment is going to be,\u201d Brewster said. \u201cWe\u2019re anticipating a lot more growth relating to this new chapter in Blue Origin\u2019s relationship with this community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Culberson County could use a boost: It typically ranks in the lowest quarter of Texas\u2019 254 counties when it comes to per capita income. An estimated 19.7% of the population lives in poverty. In recent years, those figures have been trending in a positive direction, and it\u2019s hard to argue that Blue Origin\u2019s employment isn\u2019t a factor.<\/p>\n

The impact isn\u2019t just felt in the employment statistics: Brewster said Blue Origin has also worked with developers to build more housing units in the Van Horn area. Brewster said about 40% of the company\u2019s West Texas employees claim Van Horn specifically as their place of residence.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin\u2019s employees have been known to teach robotics classes at local schools, and the company has helped develop classroom curriculum as well.<\/p>\n

\""Postcards
Ten-year-old Gabriel Williams slips a postcard into a rocket-shaped mailbox that\u2019s used for the Club for the Future\u2019s \u201cPostcards to Space\u201d program. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just outside Van Horn\u2019s Clark Hotel Museum, Blue Origin erected a mailbox for postcards that will be flown to space as part of a program created by the Club for the Future, the company\u2019s educational nonprofit foundation. The rocket-shaped box has been a magnet for local residents this week.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did 20 postcards,\u201d the museum\u2019s director, Patricia Golden, told me. More than a dozen were sold to customers who stopped by while I was visiting the museum.<\/p>\n

Golden sells postcards as well as the 36-cent stamps that have to be affixed in order for the cards to be mailed back to their senders. \u201cI wanted American flag stamps, to show that it\u2019s America,\u201d she said, but those stamps don\u2019t come in the right denomination.<\/p>\n

Viewing guide:<\/strong> How to watch Jeff Bezos\u2019 space mission<\/h4>\n

Not everything about Blue Origin\u2019s presence is appealing. Golden complained that hotel rooms in Van Horn have been hard to come by for this week\u2019s Frontier Days and Jubilee reunion, due to all the outsiders visiting for Tuesday\u2019s launch. \u201cI\u2019m not happy about all this crazy stuff,\u201d she told me. \u201cI moved here because it\u2019s Podunk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mayor Brewster is also wary about the pace of progress. She said she\u2019d prefer to see slow and steady growth rather than a short-lived boom in business \u2014 and that happens to be a perfect match for Bezos\u2019 point of view. One of the billionaire\u2019s favorite sayings is \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d And Blue Origin\u2019s mascot, going back more than 15 years, is a slow and steady tortoise.<\/p>\n

So what will Van Horn look like 15 years from now? I can\u2019t wait to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A mural painted on a vacant building in Van Horn, Texas, features Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, who are due to ride Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital spaceship on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle) VAN HORN, Texas \u2014 When I last visited this West Texas town in 2006, Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,1250,493,4402,1898],"class_list":["post-17518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-new-shepard","tag-space-tourism","tag-suborbital-spaceflight","tag-texas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17518"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}