VAN HORN, Texas — When I last visited this West Texas town in 2006, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture was planning to provide suborbital space trips for paying passengers by 2010.
The bad news for Van Horn is that it’s taken a decade longer than expected for Blue Origin’s space boom to come to town. But the good news is that the economic impact is arguably 10 times as great.
Blue Origin’s 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’s suborbital launch site a half-hour drive north of Van Horn.
Fifteen years later, the actual figure is 275 employees — due not only to Blue Origin’s 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’s based at Launch Site One.
The BE-3 engines that are used on New Shepard are built at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., but they’re put through their paces in Texas. Launch Site One is also the test site for Blue Origin’s more powerful BE-4 rocket engines.
Blue Origin’s West Texas workforce makes up just a fraction of Blue Origin’s total employee count of more than 3,500 people. Nevertheless, 275 relatively high-paying jobs have an impact on Van Horn’s 1,900 residents, and more widely on Culberson County. “They’re one of the larger taxpayers in the county — not just the city, but the county,” Van Horn Mayor Becky Brewster told me.
And that’s before Blue Origin started flying actual passengers.
“This is what the history-making moment is going to be,” Brewster said. “We’re anticipating a lot more growth relating to this new chapter in Blue Origin’s relationship with this community.”
Culberson County could use a boost: It typically ranks in the lowest quarter of Texas’ 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’s hard to argue that Blue Origin’s employment isn’t a factor.
The impact isn’t 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’s West Texas employees claim Van Horn specifically as their place of residence.
Blue Origin’s employees have been known to teach robotics classes at local schools, and the company has helped develop classroom curriculum as well.
Just outside Van Horn’s 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’s educational nonprofit foundation. The rocket-shaped box has been a magnet for local residents this week.
“I did 20 postcards,” the museum’s director, Patricia Golden, told me. More than a dozen were sold to customers who stopped by while I was visiting the museum.
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. “I wanted American flag stamps, to show that it’s America,” she said, but those stamps don’t come in the right denomination.
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Not everything about Blue Origin’s presence is appealing. Golden complained that hotel rooms in Van Horn have been hard to come by for this week’s Frontier Days and Jubilee reunion, due to all the outsiders visiting for Tuesday’s launch. “I’m not happy about all this crazy stuff,” she told me. “I moved here because it’s Podunk.”
Mayor Brewster is also wary about the pace of progress. She said she’d prefer to see slow and steady growth rather than a short-lived boom in business — and that happens to be a perfect match for Bezos’ point of view. One of the billionaire’s favorite sayings is “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” And Blue Origin’s mascot, going back more than 15 years, is a slow and steady tortoise.
So what will Van Horn look like 15 years from now? I can’t wait to find out.
