Growing More than Creosote in West Texas

Ever wonder where all those billions we've sent to Amazon wind up? Not on the bottom line, of course. The company has only put $620 million in profits down on its bottom line in the last two fiscal years against $12 billion in sales. To be fair, those profits are rising. My friend Ron Wilcox asserted last night that Amazon hadn't made a profit yet. That's the general perception, because founder Jeff Bezos ran the company for years at a loss.

Now there's millions of Bezos bucks flying out to West Texas to build a spaceport. From US News & World Report:

Virgin's Richard Branson and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen aren't the only megarich guys with their eyes on the skies. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, another billionaire, has plans to build a research-testing site and spaceport for suborbital vehicles on a recently purchased 165,000-acre ranch near the town of Van Horn, Texas. Bezos has said little publicly about the venture, dubbed Blue Origin, other than that over the next seven years he intends to construct a $30 million, three-person ship that will take off, go suborbital, and land vertically. (Think of a rocket ship in one of those campy 1950s sci-fi flicks.)

Van Horn is so far out in Texas that it's beyond Big Bend. If you've even driven out there, you look around and think you're already on the surface of the moon. There's so much space that a spaceport seems like a natural.

For years Abby and I rode out to Big Bend in our minivan and marvelled at the lack of habitation. The desolation led me to set a big part of my novel Viral Times out there. Open spaces have become more rare in Texas and throughout parts of America. In my book I've imagined that wind power would pump up the region. But space travel would do, too, although it seems many more years away. You can already see those massive wind generators on the ridges in West Texas.

A 165,000-acre ranch isn't that unusual in that part of the state. But its not nearly as common as the creosote bush, which stretches as far as the eye can travel away from the I-10 roadways. There is so much of Larrea tridentata out in West Texas that losing it from rocket engine blasts wouldn't make much of a dent.