Space postcards
Blue Origin employees who volunteer for the Club for the Future sort postcards. (Blue Origin Photo)

Are you looking for educational activities to occupy the kids while you’re cooped up due to the coronavirus outbreak? One option is to make space postcards for the Club for the Future, an educational campaign created by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Last year, Blue Origin collected thousands of student-decorated cards, and sent them to space and back on its New Shepard suborbital craft. After the flight, the cards were stamped “Flown in Space” (in some cases, by Bezos himself) and then mailed back to their senders.

Now Blue Origin is inviting students, educators and parents to submit a new batch of hand-drawn postcards that answer this question: “What would you build in space that could help Earth?”

Blue Origin is even providing a template for printing out the postcards on blank sheets of card stock – along with detailed instructions for decorating the cards and sending them to the Club for the Future, P.O. Box 5759, Kent, WA 98064.

“With Blue Origin’s access to space on the New Shepard rocket, Club for the Future is able to offer students around the world the unique opportunity to send their hopes and dreams to space – for the cost of a stamp,” the club’s director, Josef Reinke, said in a news release. “We have already flown thousands of postcards to space from students, and now they have a special flown-in-space keepsake that we hope inspires them to pursue their dreams.”

In the weeks ahead, the Club for the Future will release a curriculum suite to promote virtual learning in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is continuing development work for New Shepard, its orbital-class New Glenn rocket and its BE-4 and BE-7 rocket engines. Last week, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith told Space News that the company is still planning to start putting people on New Shepard for suborbital space trips by the end of the year.

Blue Origin set up a coronavirus task force weeks ago, and most of the company’s Seattle-area employees are working from home.

“We meet with our task force every day,” Smith told Space News. “It’s a changing environment, and we make adjustments and continue to operate.”

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