Paraplegic engineer from Germany embarked on a dream come true Saturday with five other passengers, leaving her wheelchair floating in space as she watched Earth from above.
Seriously injured in a mountain biking accident seven years ago, Michaela Benthause became the first wheelchair user in space, launching from West Texas with Jeff Bezos' company. Blue Origin. She was accompanied by retired SpaceX executive and also German-born Hans Koenigsmann, who helped organize and co-sponsored her trip with Blue Origin. Ticket prices have not been disclosed.
An ecstatic Benthause said she laughed the whole way (the capsule flew more than 65 miles (105 km)) and at one point tried to capsize in space.
“It was the coolest experience,” she said shortly after landing.
The 10-minute flight in space required only minor adjustments to accommodate the Benthouse, the company said. That's because New Shepard's autonomous capsule was designed with accessibility in mind, “making it more accessible to a wider range of people than traditional spaceflight,” said Blue Origin's Jake Mills, an engineer who trained the crew and assisted them on launch day.
Blue Origin's previous space tourists include people with limited mobility, vision and hearing impairments, and a couple in their 90s.
For Benthouse, Blue Origin added a patient transfer board so she could move between the capsule hatch and her seat. The recovery team also unrolled a carpet on the desert floor after landing, providing immediate access to her wheelchair, which she left behind during takeoff. She trained in advance, and Koenigsmann took part in the design and testing. An elevator was already installed on the launch pad, allowing it to climb seven floors to the capsule located on top of the rocket.
Benthouse, 33, part of European Space As part of the Agency's graduate internship program in the Netherlands, she experienced some moments of weightlessness during a parabolic flight from Houston in 2022. Less than two years later, she took part in a two-week simulated spaceflight in Poland.
“I never thought going into space would be a real option for me because even for a super healthy person it’s very competitive, isn’t it?” she told The Associated Press before the flight.
The accident destroyed all her hopes. “There is no history of people with disabilities going into space,” she said.
When Koenigsmann approached her last year about flying on Blue Origin and experiencing more than three minutes of weightlessness during a space jump, Benthause thought there might have been a misunderstanding. But this did not happen, and she immediately signed the contract.
This is a private Benthouse mission without the participation of the European Space Agency (ESA). which cleared up this year reserve astronaut John McFall, an amputee, for a future flight to the International Space Station. The former British Paralympian lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident when he was a teenager.
The spinal cord damage means Benthause cannot walk at all, unlike McFall, who uses a prosthetic leg and can evacuate the space capsule himself in the event of a landing emergency. Koenigsmann was appointed before the flight as her emergency assistant; he and Mills pulled her out of the capsule and down a short flight of stairs at the end of the flight.
“You should never give up on your dreams, right?” Benthouse urged after landing.
Benthause was adamant about doing everything she could on her own. Its goal is to make not only space accessible to people with disabilities, but also improve accessibility on Earth.
After receiving lots of positive feedback from inside “my space bubble,” she said outsiders aren't always so inclusive.
“I really hope this opens up for people like me, and I hope I’m just the beginning,” she said.
In addition to Koenigsman, the trip included business executives and investors, as well as a computer scientist. They increased Blue Origin's list of space travelers to 86.
Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, created Blue Origin in 2000 and launched its first passenger space flight in 2021. The company has since launched spacecraft into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a larger, more powerful New Glenn rocket, and is also working to send landers to the Moon.
