Texas’ regular license plate features a Space Shuttle, some stars and a crescent Moon, but a lot of Texas 8th graders are foggy on just why. I hope kids living near Houston have a better idea, since the Houston Johnson Space Center is in their area. To most kids under the age of 20 in Texas, space exploration is not a part of Texas history. I had one student in class ask why it was that in the movie version of the Apollo 13 story, the astronauts said “Houston, we have a problem.”
The drive to get a private spacecraft into commercial use has at least one company using Texas as a base. Space exploration may once again become a current event item in Texas social studies classes.
Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, tested their space craft in November, and the tardy news is bustling around the internet — and present in print and broadcast media, too. That the story is so hot on the internet should be a cue to mass media that it’s time to start paying attention.
The company’s test site is in Culberson County, in far west Texas — far away from the giant media markets in San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. El Paso is the closest major market, and it’s in a different time zone from the rest of the state.
This space exploration group reverses NASA’s Houston-to-Cape Canaveral style of operations — Blue Origin is headquartered in Kent, Washington, closer to Bezos’ Amazon roots.
Blue Origin is hiring engineers, by the way.
Watch that space.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Futuresheet.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
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