Three decades ago, the president of the Van Horn Chamber of Commerce offered British Airways a renovated airstrip and 1,000 acres of desert to make the isolated West Texas town a regular stop for the futuristic Concorde jet.
Strangely, the airline selected New York City and Washington, D.C., as stateside landing terminals for its swept-wing, supersonic jet, which ceased flying three years ago.
Van Horn, meanwhile, which sits midway between El Paso and Fort Stockton on Interstate 10, was left with little more than serving as a stopover for weary travelers, with budget motels lining its main street and truck stops clustered at the freeway.
But the doldrums ended abruptly last year when again the future arrived in Van Horn, only this time it came knocking.
After buying 165,000 acres of desert a half-hour north of town, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos announced plans to build a spaceport that would lead to flights for space tourists.
These days, Van Horn, population 2,400, is buzzing with the glow of hosting a high-tech, high-dollar private project.
"We're excited. If Van Horn can be on the cutting edge of private space exploration, I'm all for it," said Ron Helms, 50, a white-hatted rancher.
"In the past they've had things out here like New York City sewer sludge and low-level nuclear waste sites. But this one isn't a black eye for us. It's a clean, progressive, optimistic thing."
With dozens of construction workers working on the spaceport -- and spending money in town -- the project has already given the local economy a nice boost. Long term, however, no one really knows how many permanent local jobs will result.
So far, officials at Blue Origin, the company Bezos founded to develop the space project, have not been exactly chatty about their plans.
"We're all happy about it, but they don't tell us anything. We're kept in the dark," said Culberson County Judge John Conoly, 77, who has held the post for 32 years.
"It's a private enterprise thing, so I guess they don't have to tell us anything. We don't want to bug them or alienate them, so we just wait for them to tell us what they want us to know."
Test flights planned
What little is known was revealed recently in a draft of an environmental assessment produced for the Federal Aviation Administration. The study, which is necessary for Blue Origin to obtain federal permits to operate, turned up no significant obstacles to the spaceport.
"Blue Origin proposes to launch reusable launch vehicles on subortibal ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 99,060 meters (325,000 feet)," reads the 229-page document posted on the FAA Web site.
That 60-mile altitude is roughly nine times the cruising altitude of a modern passenger jet. The moon, by comparison, is about 240,000 miles from Earth.
Plans call for the 50-foot-tall conical rockets, powered by hydrogen peroxide and kerosene, to make vertical landings at the West Texas site.
The document says Blue Origin hopes to begin test flights to altitudes of 2,000 feet later this year. By comparison, the Empire State Building in New York is 1,453 feet tall.
Over the next three years, Blue Origin plans to increase the rate of test flights to as many as 25 a year. Within four years, commercial manned flight could begin with as many as 52 launches in a year, according to the study.
At a public hearing attended by about 50 people last week in Van Horn, only three people signed up to speak and none had anything critical to say about the project. Nine of those present were journalists, and only about a third of the attendees were from Van Horn.
"Blue Origin is hoping to receive their experimental permits before the end of August, which would clear the way for test flights of prototype vehicles. At this point, the chances are good that their environmental review will be approved," said Doug Graham, an FAA environmental specialist who conducted the hearing.
But Blue Origin's smooth sailing so far is in sharp contrast to the reception given another proposed private spaceport on the other side of Texas.
In Brazoria, numerous objections have been raised to a launch site that adjoins a wildlife refuge.
At a recent public hearing in Brazoria over an FAA license, only two of 34 people spoke in support.
"Brazoria was much more controversial. These guys are much further along," said Graham of Blue Origin.
Highly secretive
True to form, the Blue Origin officials at the public hearing last week in Van Horn declined to comment.
Among the curious drawn to the event were space buffs Peter and Celeste Stokely of Austin, who are tracking the various private space projects in the Southwest. Their next stop would be New Mexico, where another spaceport is planned.
"I hope one day to be working for one of these commercial space tourist companies," said Celeste Stokely, who said learning details about the Blue Origin project has been a daunting task.
"It's been like Fort Knox. I've been reduced to reading the space blogs, but they are just guessing," she said.
One of the few locals to meet with Bezos is Larry Simpson, editor of the Van Horn paper and president of the Chamber of Commerce. Bezos came by the newspaper office last year and gave him an exclusive interview.
"It was kind of a bare bones outline of what he envisioned and what he was going to do, and now, a year and seven months later, he seems to be putting it all into place," Simpson said.
"Jeff told me early on that it would create about 30 jobs when it's up and running. Probably five of them will be local and 25 from outside," he said.
Simpson said he has high hopes that the spaceport will provide a permanent boost to the local economy.
"We can feel it big-time now. If half of it sticks around, it will be significant. And when he starts launching rockets, the people who will take these space flights will be staying here," he said.
Simpson said it was his father-in-law, M. J. Mitchell, who three decades ago tried to exploit Van Horn's very wide, open spaces by inviting the Concorde here, adding, "He was real excited about it, although maybe not very realistic.
"I think this time it will happen. There's no question in my mind we're going to see him (Bezos) get to space. Once he gets that FAA permit, he'll be off and running."
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