Blue Origin, Small West Texas Town Now Friends

A small, west Texas town has become the center of "space tourism" despite decades of suspicion and mistrust between them and the company behind it.

When Jeff Bezos first launched, (no pun intended), Blue Origin in the desert near Van Horn, Texas; they got off to a rocky, (no pun intended there either), start. A "tension" simmered between Bezos' people and the locals.

It was as though a line had been drawn between the two groups and now, 21 years later, everything seems cool and as friendly as Texas is known to be.

I've been to Van Horn, located about 130 miles east of El Paso via I-10, a zillion times visiting friends and family and, trust me, they're a tight knit bunch. The population is small and everybody knows everybody. Strangers are welcomed but watched until they're better known.

That watchfulness started getting a little uneasy. Van Horn was chosen because of all the available land surrounding it. You need a lot of room to launch rockets and Van Horn had plenty, although it didn't offer much else.

Why Were Van Horn Residents So Suspicious?

Van Horn's small. So small that, at one point, the same doctor ... over several generations ... had delivered every baby born there. Parent, kid, grandkid - he may have even brought in a couple of great grandkids. The residents are clannish and protective while the Blue Origin peeps were working out in the middle of nowhere toward an unknown purpose.

The cloud of suspicion thickened when workers came into town. The top secret nature of their work kept them from talking about it and there really wasn't much else to talk about so, tension mounted.

A Line Was Drawn

Townsfolk on one side, Blue Origin folk on the other. That's, basically, how Van Horn Mayor Rebecca Brewster summed things up. By 2016 though, the cat was creeping out of the bag and peeps began to open up a little.

When they were in the development stages, Blue Origin was so secretive about what was going on, their people couldn’t really socialize because they couldn’t talk about their work and things like that,” Brewster said. “And it was like, here are the Blue Origin people and here are the Van Horn people. But that’s starting to change for the better. - nbcdfw.com

Now, workers talk more and their family members are part of the community, serving on local charities and such. Several high profile passengers and a zillion news stories later, the secret's out and the tide's turning.

Friendships are forming as Blue Origin no longer seem like sinister, Twilight Zone" characters and the economic benefit to the area is becoming clear.