Blue Origin's Club for the Future inspires future generations of space explorers

SEATTLE (KOMO) — A new initiative from Blue Origin, the space exploration company and space launch service founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, aims at ensuring the next generation want to traverse the 'final frontier'.

At Seattle's Bryn Mawr Elementary School in the Renton School District, students got a lesson in space as part of Blue Origin's Club for the Future.

The event included presentations from Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith and retired NASA astronaut captain Wendy Lawrence, who flew on four space shuttle missions for NASA.

"You can't be what you can't see," Lawrence said. "I grew up not seeing anybody who looked like me as a NASA astronaut, but I did get to watch 'Star Trek' at the very same time, so I saw people who looked like me flying in space at least on television, and that's a huge motivator."

"I hope today for the girls they sat there and looked at somebody who looks like them who got to do something amazing."

Smith said Blue Origin designed Club for the Future because its job in this generation is to build a road to space.

"Once we build that road we want to have another generation come behind us so that we can utilize all the space resources and actually to inspire that generation to go further than we did," Smith said.

They spend a lot of time learning things out of a book, and where's the application aspect?" Lawrence said. "Today was about — look at how we can apply this information to go off and do some really fun things in space, some amazing things.

Students also made postcards that Blue Origin will take to space.

"We actually have our postcards to space, which is kind of our signature event, which we actually take postcards and we fly them into space and send them back to us," Smith said. "People have something they can actually hold onto that went into space."

"I asked what do you guys eat and how do you lay back," Bryn Mawr student Bollo Sow said.

I put Saturn and make sure I circled all the stars that came," student Benjamin Brooks said.

The Kent-based company hosts programs like this at schools across the country, but this time they're in their own backyard.

"I hope they take away that it's a hopeful future," Smith said. "It's a future that we can make much brighter by actually going into space and actually bringing this world back together."

Blue Origin expects to send 6,700 postcards from across the Renton School District to space.

The visit to Bryn Mawr comes as NASA prepares to return to the moon with its Artemis missions.

The moon to me is a logical place to go," Lawrence said. "We need it as an engineering test bed, so the crews who get to go on the Artemis mission are going to have a lot work ahead of them, but very important work because we can show that the current technology we have will get us back to the moon, will allow crews to actually live on the moon this time. That bodes well to turning our sights for farther-away destinations, maybe asteroids to mine them, maybe landing on Mars one day to figure out how to live there.

"I'm so excited about it," said Smith, who noted he was inspired by Apollo growing up. "I've been waiting my entire career for us to go back to the moon."