HUNTSVILLE — You can’t help but wonder what Benjamin Franklin would think.
Blue Origin’s private foundation, Club for the Future, basically establishes a send and pickup mail service to and from space through its Postcards to Space program. The program is established in the U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s hands-on engineering Spark!Lab.
The amazing thing about this postbox is it has been built and debuted by local students and educators – in collaboration with the aerospace industry.
Any visitor to the rocket center can draw on a postcard their vision of why Earth needs space, drop it in the postbox, and Blue Origin will fly it on a New Shepard mission.
The postcards are then validated with a stamp “Flown to Space” by members of the Club for the Future and returned to the creators.
Club for the Future’s goal is to send more than 1 million postcards to space this year.
Last week, the foundation, Madison City Schools and the rocket center unveiled a six-foot-tall, rocket-shaped postbox. It was designed and built by students in Bob Jones High School’s Construction Academy. Blue Origin engineers Armando Gonzalez-Feuchter and Larry Powell supervised the construction.
This collaboration serves as an example of how educational institutions and the aerospace industry work together to inspire students to pursue STEM careers.
Each organization is committed to fostering a spirit of education and exploration. Through this project, students gained hands-on experience in design, engineering, mathematics and construction while giving Rocket Center visitors a personal connection to space through the Postcards to Space program.
The Postcards to Space postbox is the second one for the program. The first is in Van Horn, Texas, near Blue Origin’s Launch Site One.
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