A mural painted on a vacant building in Van Horn, Texas, features Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, who are due to ride Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) 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.