A paraplegic engineer from Germany has become the first wheelchair user in space, launching from West Texas with Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The flight was just 10 minutes but the capsule still managed to soar 105 kilometres up, skimming into space.<\/p>\n
Michaela Benthaus, 33, was able to float in space for more than 3 minutes, leaving her wheelchair behind, which she has used since being severely injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Blue Origin capsule floated back to the ground with parachutes on Saturday. (AP: Blue Origin)<\/p>\n
Ms Benthaus said she laughed all the way up.<\/p>\n
“It was the coolest experience,” she said shortly after landing.<\/p>\n
Ms Benthaus shared the ride with five other passengers including business executives, investors and a computer scientist, raising Blue Origin’s list of space travellers to 86.<\/p>\n
One passenger was retired SpaceX executive Hans Koenigsmann, who helped organise and sponsor her trip with Blue Origin.<\/p>\n
Their ticket prices were not divulged.<\/p>\n
Making space accessible for disabled people<\/p>\n
Ms Benthaus was part of the European Space Agency’s graduate trainee program in the Netherlands, so she had experienced snippets of weightlessness in test flights previously.<\/p>\n
In 2022 Ms Benthaus was on a parabolic aeroplane flight out of Houston, but says she never thought going to space would be possible.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“There is like no history of people with disabilities flying to space,” she said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Michaela Benthaus has been in a wheelchair for seven years, after a mountain bike accident. (AP: Blue Origin)<\/p>\n
When Mr Koenigsmann approached her last year about the possibility of flying on Blue Origin and experiencing more than 3 minutes of weightlessness on a space hop, Ms Benthaus thought there might be a misunderstanding.<\/p>\n
But there wasn’t, and she immediately signed on.<\/p>\n
Her goal is to now make not only space accessible to the disabled, but to improve accessibility on Earth too.<\/p>\n
“I really hope it’s opening up for people like me, like I hope I’m only the start,” she said.<\/p>\n
Minor adjustments to space capsule\u00a0<\/p>\n
An injured spinal cord means Ms Benthaus can’t walk at all, but the autonomous New Shepard capsule required only minor adjustments to accommodate her, according to the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Blue Origin’s flight engineer, Jake Mills, said that was because it was designed with accessibility in mind, “making it more accessible to a wider range of people than traditional spaceflight”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Blue Origin launched its first passenger spaceflight in 2021.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 (AP: Blue Origin)<\/p>\n
An elevator was in place at the launch pad to ascend the seven storeys to the capsule perched atop the rocket.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin added a patient transfer board so Ms Benthaus could scoot between the capsule’s hatch and her seat.<\/p>\n
The recovery team also unrolled a carpet on the desert floor following touchdown, providing immediate access to her wheelchair, which she left behind at lift-off.<\/p>\n
Following touchdown Ms Benthaus said: “You should never give up on your dreams, right?”\u00a0<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A paraplegic engineer from Germany has become the first wheelchair user in space, launching from West Texas with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,34986,99,197053,11917,197052,285,5437,23000],"class_list":{"0":"post-361730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-blue-origin","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-hans-koenigsmann","13":"tag-jeff-bezos","14":"tag-michaela-benthaus","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-spacex","17":"tag-wheelchair"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}