German Engineer Michaela Benthaus Is First Wheelchair User To Go Into Space

She was joined by five other passengers, including retired SpaceX executive Hans Koenigsmann, also from Germany, who helped organize and sponsor her trip alongside Blue Origin, though the ticket prices were not disclosed.

Benthaus described the experience, “It was the coolest experience,” she said after landing, recalling how she laughed throughout the flight and even attempted to turn upside down in weightlessness. The capsule soared more than 65 miles above Earth during the 10‑minute journey.

The flight required only minor adjustments to accommodate Benthaus, according to the company. That’s because the autonomous New Shepard capsule was designed with accessibility in mind for 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.

Among Blue Origin’s previous space tourists are those with limited mobility and impaired sight or hearing, and a pair of 90-year-olds. For Benthaus, Blue Origin added a patient transfer board so she could scoot between the capsule’s hatch and her seat. The recovery team also unrolled a carpet on the desert floor following touchdown, providing immediate access to her wheelchair, which she left behind at liftoff.

She practiced in advance, with Koenigsmann taking part in the design and testing. An elevator was already in place at the launch pad to ascend the seven stories to the capsule perched atop the rocket. Benthaus, 33, part of the European Space Agency’s graduate trainee program in the Netherlands, experienced snippets of weightlessness during a parabolic airplane flight out of Houston in 2022. Less than two years later, she took part in a two-week simulated space mission in Poland.“I never really thought that going on a spaceflight would be a real option for me because even as a super healthy person, it’s like so competitive, right?” she told The Associated Press ahead of the flight.

Her accident dashed whatever hope she had. “There is no history of people with disabilities flying to 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 on a space hop, Benthaus thought there might be a misunderstanding. But there wasn't, and she immediately signed on. It’s a private mission for Benthaus with no involvement by ESA, which this year cleared 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. An injured spinal cord means Benthaus can’t walk at all, unlike McFall, who uses a prosthetic leg and could evacuate a space capsule in an emergency at touchdown by himself.

Koenigsmann was designated before flight as her emergency helper; he and Mills lifted her out of the capsule and down the short flight of steps at flight’s end.“You should never give up on your dreams, right?” Benthaus urged the following touchdown. Benthaus was adamant about doing as much as she could by herself. Her goal is to make not only space accessible to the disabled, but to improve accessibility on Earth, too.

While getting lots of positive feedback, she said, outsiders aren't always as inclusive.“I really hope it’s opening up for people like me, like I hope I’m only the start," she said. Besides Koenigsmann, Benthaus shared the ride with business executives and investors and a computer scientist. They raised Blue Origin’s list of space travelers to 86. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, created Blue Origin in 2000 and launched the first passenger spaceflight in 2021. The company has since delivered spacecraft to orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, using the bigger and more powerful New Glenn rocket, and is working to send landers to the moon.