It was just about 8:00 a.m. on Monday April 14th. I was outside the gates of Blue Origin Launch Site One with a gang of 30 or so rocket enthusiasts waiting to see smoke.
The launch window was set to begin at 8:30 Central Time, so this was essentially a pre-game tailgate - people perched on the backs of trucks, others craned towards the distance in camping chairs, most of them decked out in some kind of Blue Origin or generic space-themed swag. CBS 7 was there, and had brought a prop astronaut helmet which sat on a small folding table, also waiting for its moment.
I hadn’t known what kind of crowd to expect when I arrived. My mom remembers watching the moon landing in a neighbor’s living room (her mom choked on a melon ball mid-broadcast, it was a whole thing). The Space Race was always in the background of her adolescence; she says it was like watching the Olympics and rooting for your country’s team - space was a place to be a patriot, to take pride in being part of an innovative nation. As a child of the 90s, I learned about outer space discoveries with relative regularity. Space, I had always understood, was for the professionals and explorers, a rarefied place you only got to go to with a lot of training. Not pay-to-play. But somewhere down the line, that changed, resulting in what I went to see on Monday morning.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight startup, Blue Origin, was about to launch six women of varying levels of celebrity into the stratosphere. The crew included pop star Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, feminist activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn and journalist/philanthropist/business woman Lauren Sánchez. Sánchez, notably, is engaged to marry Jeff Bezos, who, according to a leaked text exchange, at least once referred to her as “alive girl.”
The mountains glowed with early light, entirely otherworldly. The juxtaposition of spacecrafts flying out of the desert landscape, sonic booms ricocheting off the mountains, is not lost on me. The desert has always been strongly connected to the world of sci-fi and space: supernatural and atomic mythologies thrive in the Southwest - missile tests, UFOs, forces beyond our earthly comprehension (the Marfa Lights, for example). The rugged ground out here looks as much like an artifact as it does the setting of a Star Trek episode.
Collette Barragan, a Fort Stockton teacher in a cobalt Blue Origin Tee shirt, was holding court at the turnoff. She'd come in early that morning with her son, Tristin, and a student from her class. She took off her sunglasses to reveal eyes rimmed in electric blue mascara.
Barragan has been to all 31 of Blue Origin’s launches. She’s become somewhat of a guide for people looking to come out and watch the flights. She connects with other rocket groupies via Facebook, providing them with maps, parking instructions, and tips on where to get the best view.
I asked her what it is that keeps her coming back to watch the launches:
“ I think it's just the emotion of knowing that there's people going up fulfilling their dream,” she said. “Yes, it's tourism, but why not? if I could do it, I would do it.”
I found myself standing beside a tall, bespectacled and mustachioed man named, I kid you not, Houston Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe told me he used to work for NASA, and had come all the way from Lubbock to see the launch. Despite his career in the civil space program, he’d never seen one before.
To clarify: a Blue Origin launch is very different from a NASA launch. Blue Origin trips are for private space tourism, rather than exploration or research purposes. And the crew members are not trained astronauts, they are passengers aboard the New Shepard, a reusable craft consisting of a detachable capsule and a launch rocket.
Blue Origin has been promoting this flight as the first all female crew to launch into space since 1963, when one woman, the Soviet Union cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, made a solo trip into space. The New Shepard group is a carefully PR-calibrated bouquet of ladies boasting different but complementary public-facing achievements.
The press around the launch has felt slightly antithetical to its feminist aims: an article about Amanda Nguyen’s “out of this world skincare picks” or a New York Times piece about the crew’s custom new space suits, made of skin tight neoprene, which Lauren Sánchez co-designed. They’ve got a voluminous flare in the pants, a cross between Lululemon and Elvis Presley. The main takeaway is that you can look glam in space.
Perry is the obvious press draw here, if only for her meme potential, though I’d argue she’s as qualified as anyone for a suborbital cruise around the earth. Her song E.T., about, shall we say, “relations,” with an alien life form, makes me confident that she’s more than ready to hang out in space for a few minutes (for what it’s worth, the song E.T. is so deeply burned into my brain that when it recently came on at Taconeta in El Paso, I began singing it on autopilot, like a sleeper agent awakened).
Taking an informal poll of the viewing crowd, the girl power angle seemed to have worked - multiple ship-gazers had been drawn to the desert because of Perry and King’s starpower.
“ I'm old enough now where I may not get to see anymore, you know what I mean?” said Oglethorpe. “And I like both the ladies, you know, Katy Perry and Gayle King.”
I asked him if he’d heard Katy Perry’s song E.T., but he said he mostly knew her from American Idol.
Two identical 8-year old twin girls, Azalea and Lilia Perez, were decked out in matching NASA spacesuits, holding orange plastic helmets. They swung their legs off of the back of a truck, giggling as they waited for the ship to take off. Their mom told me that their aunt works for NASA, and that they were inspired by “the girls going up.”
The twins told me, in shy voices, that they both wanted to be astronauts. This was their first launch.
“I want to see Katy Perry fly,” said Azalea. (For the record, her favorite Katy Perry song is California Girls.)
8:30 hit, and there was a palpable shift in energy as everyone quieted and turned towards the distance. Collette Barragan had pointed me in the direction of the rocket, but it took the giant, telltale cloud of smoke for me to see it - a thin rocket launching into the air, trailing a fluffy line in its wake, thicker and loopier than a typical chemtrail. The girls had left the earth.
Then, like a movie out of sync, came the sonic boom. It was full-body vibratory, rumbling, like a loud, heavy wind, echoing off the mountains that rim the horizon.
I found my place next to Oglethorpe, who, as a NASA professional, I figured would tell me what I was looking at.
A few minutes passed, then the Perez twins shrieked and laughed as a parachute came into view, carrying the detached New Shepard capsule down to safety.
Oglethorpe seemed nonplussed.
“ That's them,” he said.
About a minute of silence passed before he turned to me and whispered, “I don't think that'd be worth $250,000, though, do you?”
The full price of a New Shepard ticket has not been disclosed. In the past, Bezos has said Blue Origin will price its flights similarly to its competitors. One such competitor, Virgin Galactic, has offered rides between $200,000 and $450,000, according to the Associated Press. In any case, a deposit of $150,000 is required, according to Blue Origin’s booking form.
The Perez twins were giggling and hopping around. Azalea thought seeing the rocket go up was funny. “It was just like a little black line,” she said.
“ The big boom gave me a mini heart attack,” said Lilia.
By 8:45, the flight was over. Driving back towards Van Horn, the closest town to Blue Origin Launch Site One, I spotted a crowd of at least 30 people gathered around a flat screen TV hooked up to a generator on the side of the road.
The group was watching the livestream of the launch, in HD, right next to the launch itself - a moon landing living room scene, copied and pasted into the desert. I pulled over to investigate. It turned out they were all friends or colleagues of the feminist activist Amanda Nguyen, and had come for a watch party. An airstream sat close by, stocked with snacks and provisions from E.L.F. Cosmetics, a makeup company, who had partnered with Nguyen for the launch.
Sleek black E.L.F. goodie bags, more at home in a Fashion Square Mall than in the middle of the desert, sat scattered around the viewing party. It looked like an offshoot of Prada Marfa - luxury in the middle of nowhere.
I arrived at the Nyugen roadside viewing party just in time to catch Katy Perry exit the craft and kiss the ground (having inadvertently face-planted many times in the Chihuahuan Desert, I can’t imagine it was a pleasurable smooch).
"I feel super connected to love," Perry said shortly after landing.
“It’s about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging, and it’s about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it," Perry said. "This is all for the benefit of Earth."
Taking up space in space. The message falls a little flat for me, down here on earth. Space has, historically, been a primarily male space, yes, but a commercial launch with six-figure seats doesn’t exactly scream inclusion when eggs at my local grocery store are $6.99. The significance of this all-female flight has been dissected thoroughly, and the question still stands whether an extremely expensive sub-orbital seven minutes in space is one small step for Katy Perry or a giant leap for womankind.
The future may be now, but who gets to actually live in it? As we careen towards a world full of wild technological advancements, so many of the truly insane ones will not be experienced by most. A Jetsons-esque future has arrived (albeit in strange pieces), but it’s only really come to pass for those who can afford it. The reactions from passengers like Perry only serve to underscore the grand rifts in our socioeconomic world, how even the most mind-bending experiences have become a fairly casual thrill for the uber-wealthy.
Driving away from the Blue Origin super fans and the adorable twins who did seem genuinely inspired by women in space, I felt like a cynic. I arrived back in Van Horn to find quiet streets. It was a cloudy day, bright and stuffy hot.
Van Horn was created as a stopping-off point on the way somewhere else - first as a water stop and shipping point from the railroad, and now, for some, it’s a stop on the way to outer space. The town sits at the intersection of US-90, State Highway 56, and Interstate-10. El Paso to the West, Marfa to the East, Carlsbad to the North. Coming upon it from the highway, it rises like a mirage - chain hotel signs tall and reedy as palm trees, houses nested into flat land. The population sits around 2,000 people.
Outside of the El Capitan Hotel in the middle of town, an inflatable Blue Origin capsule model shuddered in the warm wind. The hotel was calm when I visited, but an employee who wanted to remain anonymous told me that it had been especially busy this launch. She guessed that was due to Gayle King and Katy Perry.
The hotel doesn’t house the astronauts - they have their own “astronaut village” at the launch site - but it does see traffic from family, friends, and fans. The employee I spoke with didn’t see any famous people, but she knew they were in town. In particular, she heard Oprah Winfrey, who would be seeing off Gayle King, had been around (King built a career out of being Winfrey’s sidekick, and it’s funny how the tables briefly turned in West Texas – King blasting off into space as Winfrey waved from below, relegated to the partners zone with Katy Perry’s husband Orlando Bloom. Oh, to be a fly on the wall…)
As for Blue Origin's presence in the area, the hotel employee said she was skeptical at first. She grew up in Van Horn and didn’t know what was going to happen, but she’s glad Bezos came to Van Horn. She thinks it's good that Blue Origin has provided jobs for people in town and appreciates the tourist traffic.
Blue Origin Launch Site One is about 25 miles outside of Van Horn proper, so rather than say, the presence of Elon Musks’s SpaceX in Boca Chica, which is very much integrated into that town, Blue Origin sits somewhat adjacent to the happenings of Van Horn. The city itself doesn’t bear too much of a mark, other than a massive Jeff Bezos mural (as much a monument to baldness as to rocketry). Though there’s one very palpable thing: when a rocket launches, everyone can feel the sonic boom.
“It’s like, what? Seven minutes in heaven?” said Christina Babb, an employee at Higginbotham Brothers Hardware store. “Seven minutes up there while people are struggling down here?”
Babb grew up in the smaller town of Valentine, 30 minutes away from Van Horn. She’s annoyed at how little Bezos and his company are involved in the town. Babb suggested Bezos integrate himself more in the community - let some local kids come up to the launch site for a field trip. Invest in the town itself.
“It’s social segregation,” she told me. “They’re beyond rich. Give a little bit more money, and that's it. It's like, you’ve got pocket change. All this town really needs is your pocket change.”
Babb said most locals she knows are pretty jaded about it, even the ones that work for Blue Origin. It’s just a job, or a business in the backyard. But she’s accepted it, to a degree.
“As long as their rocket doesn’t fall on our town, I’m fine with it,” Babb deadpanned.
The Valero gas station on the road to Marfa was empty. The cashier said she’d watched the launch, felt the boom. Her daughter worked in the kitchen at the launch site. She thought it was exciting. As we were talking, she got a text - her daughter had not yet met Katy Perry, but was holding out hope. Maybe later.
I hit the road back home and hit play on California Girls, which felt at odds with the moment.
As Jeff Bezos takes ride after ride on his rocket roller coaster, he continues to dim the thrill of space travel by acting like it’s casual. I’ll never forget the flight on which Bezos spent precious sub-orbital minutes throwing skittles into the mouth of a Dutch millionaire to demonstrate zero gravity. It was only William Shatner who really grasped the weight of visiting the stratosphere. Like Perry, Shatner had already been to space in the realm of the pretend (in Star Trek, as Captain Kirk).
“It was dark,” Shatner said. “There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold…all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth.”
A far cry from Perry’s extraterrestrial rendition of What a Wonderful World.
Endnotes
- Our good friend Carlos Morales reported a story for NPR's Morning Edition. Morales spoke to locals and law enforcement officials about the increased military presence in the Big Bend along the US/Mexico border. Read and listen to the story HERE.
- In this week's Nature Notes, Drew Stuart speaks to USGS wildlife biologist Dr. Clint Boal about "riparian zones" - the cottonwood forests growing along now-empty creekbeds - and their essential role for one of our region's most commanding inhabitants: raptors.
- The Caló word of the week is troca. It comes from the English word truck. Toca has become such a favored word that it’s used extensively outside of Caló. You hear it throughout Mexico and Central America, as well as the US side of the Rio Grande. Caló is a borderland dialect. You can read and listen to more episodes here.
- Check out this special edition of the Texas Music Hour Of Power with Joe Nick Patoski LIVE at Marfa Public Radio featuring in-studio performances by The Moonshiners, Al Staeheley, The Border Blasters, and Doug Moreland. (Originally aired Saturday, April 12, 2025).
- The Nature Conservancy’s West Texas Program will be hosting guided tours of the Marathon Grasslands Preserve on Friday, May 2nd and Saturday May 3rd. Tours start at 9am and end at noon.Space is limited and reservations are required.
- In celebration of International Dark Sky Week, the McDonald Observatory and area community partners will be hosting a variety of events showcasing the dark skies of West Texas. The Dark Skies Festival will include special talks, tours, Star Parties and more. Click here for a complete schedule of events and more information.
An update on our federal funding
We sent out a Dispatch a couple of weeks ago about a hearing in Washington and shared why federal funding matters to Marfa Public Radio and other public media organizations. Now, we have confirmation that plans to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are moving forward.
The Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media by rescinding funds from the CPB to the tune of $1.1 billion. For our listeners, readers, members, and communities, this funding threat isn't just a political fight—it could eliminate your access to essential news and information in Far West Texas. Marfa Public Radio relies on CPB funds for 32% of our budget, and losing this support would be devastating for the communities we serve.
Here's how you can show up for Marfa Public Radio and public media today:
- Donate to Marfa Public Radio.
- Go to ProtectMyPublicMedia.org to learn about how to contact your representatives and let them know you support public media funding.
