Disabled engineer becomes first wheelchair user to blast off for space

A disabled engineer from Germany has blasted off on a dream-come-true rocket ride with five other passengers, leaving her wheelchair behind to float in space while viewing the Earth from on high.

Severely injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago, Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user to launch to space, soaring from West Texas with Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin.

She was accompanied by a retired SpaceX executive also born in Germany, Hans Koenigsmann, who helped organise and, along with Blue Origin, sponsored her trip. Their ticket prices were not divulged.

The 10-minute space-skimming flight required only minor adjustments to accommodate Ms Benthaus, according to the company.

That is 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 Blue Origin’s Jake Mills, an engineer who trained the crew and assisted them on launch day.

Among Blue Origin’s previous space tourists have been people with limited mobility and impaired sight or hearing, and two 90-year-olds.

For Ms Benthaus, Blue Origin added a patient transfer board so she could scoot between the capsule’s hatch and her seat.

The recovery team also had a carpet to lay on the desert floor following touchdown, providing immediate access to her wheelchair, which she left behind at lift-off.

She practised in advance, with Mr Koenigsmann taking part with 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.

The 33-year-old, part of the European Space Agency’s graduate trainee programme in the Netherlands, experienced snippets of weightlessness during a parabolic plane 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 like 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 like no history of people with disabilities flying to space,” she said.

When Mr 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, Ms Benthaus thought there might be a misunderstanding. But there was not, and she immediately signed on.

It is a private mission for Ms 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 Ms Benthaus cannot walk at all, unlike Mr McFall who uses a prosthetic leg and could evacuate a space capsule in an emergency at touchdown by himself.

Mr Koenigsmann was designated before flight as her emergency helper; he also was asked to help her out of the capsule and down the short flight of steps at flight’s end.

Ms 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 within “my space bubble”, she said outsiders are not 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 Mr Koenigsmann, Ms Benthaus shared the ride with business executives and investors, and a computer scientist. They raised Blue Origin’s list of space travellers to 86.

Mr Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, created Blue Origin in 2000 and launched on its 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.