A paralyzed engineer from Germany took off on a rocket with five other passengers on Saturday, a dream come true, leaving his wheelchair behind as he floated into space, looking at the Earth from above.
Michaela Benthouse, who was seriously injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago, became the first wheelchair user to fly into space from West Texas with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company. She was accompanied by fellow German-born former SpaceX executive Hans Königsmann, who along with Blue Origin helped organize and sponsored her trip. Ticket prices have not been disclosed.
An ecstatic Benthouse, laughing the entire time, said the capsule climbed more than 105 miles and nearly flipped over in space.
“It was the coolest experience,” she said shortly after landing.
The 10-minute space-skimming flight required only minor adjustments to accommodate the vent house, the company said. That’s because the autonomous New Shepard capsule was designed with accessibility in mind, making it “more accessible to a wider range of people than traditional spaceflight,” said Jake Mills, a Blue Origin engineer who trained the crew and assisted on launch day.
Blue Origin’s previous space travelers have included people with limited mobility, visual and hearing impairments, and a pair of 90-year-olds.
For the vent house, Blue Origin added a patient transfer board to allow it to scoot between the capsule hatch and the seat. The recovery team also spread carpeting on the desert floor after landing, giving her immediate access to the wheelchair she left behind during takeoff. She practiced beforehand and Koenigsmann helped design and test it. An elevator was already installed on the launch pad to take you seven floors up to the capsule at the top of the rocket.
Benthuis, 33, a participant in the European Space Agency’s graduate trainee program in the Netherlands, experienced weightlessness during a parabolic flight from Houston in 2022. Less than two years later, she participated in a two-week mock space mission in Poland.
“I never thought going on a spaceflight would be a realistic option for me, because spaceflight is so competitive, even for super healthy people, right?” she told The Associated Press before her departure.
Her accident dashed any hopes she had. “There is no history of people with disabilities flying into space,” she said.
When Koenigsmann approached her last year about the possibility of flying on Blue Origin and experiencing more than three minutes of weightlessness in space, Benthaus thought there might be a misunderstanding. But that wasn’t to be, so she signed on right away.
This is a civilian mission by Benthouse, and ESA is not involved. This year, ESA cleared reserve amputee astronaut John McFall to fly to a future International Space Station. The former British Paralympic athlete lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident when he was a teenager.
Unlike McFall, who uses a prosthetic leg and can escape from the space capsule alone in an emergency, Benthouse, who has a spinal cord injury, is unable to walk at all. Koenigsmann was designated as her emergency helper before her departure. He and Mills lifted her out of the capsule and down a short flight of stairs at the end of the flight.
“You never give up on your dreams, right?” Benthouse said after the touchdown.
Benthouse was adamant about doing as much as possible himself. Her goal is not only to make space accessible to people with disabilities, but also to improve accessibility on Earth.
She said that while she gets a lot of positive feedback within “my space bubble,” outsiders aren’t always as inclusive.
“I really hope this path opens up for people like me, just as I hope it’s just the beginning,” she said.
In addition to Koenigsmann, Benthaus was accompanied by business executives, investors, and computer scientists. They increased the list of Blue Origin space travelers to 86 people.
Amazon founder and billionaire Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and launched it on its first passenger spaceflight in 2021. The company has since used a larger, more powerful New Glenn rocket to deliver a spacecraft into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is also working on sending a lunar lander.
Dan writes for The Associated Press.
