Jeff Bezos wore El Paso-made cowboy boots to space

EL PASO, Texas -- An El Paso company made the cowboy boots that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wore when he went to space this week.

He wore the boots, that he bought a few years ago, while he was weightless inside Blue Origin's New Shepard spaceship, which launched near Van Horn, about 100 miles east of El Paso.

The manufacturer that made the boots is the JB Hill Boot Company, which also has a store in El Paso near the airport.

Owner Jim Hill told ABC-7 that he found out Bezos wore his company's boots a few hours after the spaceflight.

"It was brought to my awareness later in the day when we started getting telephone calls and asking for confirmation whether they were our boots," he said.

Hill confirmed the boots were handmade in El Paso and now he's updated the JB Hill website to highlight that the company made the first cowboy boots worn in space.

ABC-7 research uncovered that Bezos is said to be a little superstitious and considers the El Paso-made footwear to be his lucky boots.

Those boots have been his footwear of choice every time Blue Origin has conducted test flights, so it only made sense that he also wore them when he went into space.

The owner of JB Hill said it's too early to say if sales will increase, but he still considers what happened to be a big deal.

"I think it's just very exciting," Hill said. "I'm sure there've never been any other cowboy boots in space. And the fact that these are Mr. Bezos' lucky boots, that's what he considers them, his lucky boots - that's very satisfactory to us."

The Blue Origin motto, a latin word that means "step by step, ferociously," is also burned into those lucky boots.

For more about these cowboy boots, take a look at the YouTube video posted by Jeremiah Craig, who has researched the topic.