A German engineer has become the first wheelchair user to go to space as part of a Blue Origin mission.<\/p>\n
Jeff Bezos’ aerospace firm Blue Origin marked the historic milestone on 20 December after launching the first wheelchair user above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line – the internationally recognised boundary of space.<\/p>\n
German aerospace engineer Michaela Benthaus, an engineer with the European Space Agency, sustained a spinal cord injury after a mountain biking accident in 2018 and has since become an advocate for accessible space travel.<\/p>\n
She and her fellow passengers Joey Hyde, Hans Koenigsmann, Neal Milch, Adonis Pouroulis, and Jason Stansel blasted off into space aboard a Blue Origin New Shephard rocket.<\/p>\n
The crew experienced a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth via parachute-assisted landing in the West Texas desert.<\/p>\n
“I think you should never give up on your dreams, right? I mean, there’s also sometimes just a low probability that it comes true. And I just got very lucky,” Ms Benthaus said upon landing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A German engineer has become the first wheelchair user to go to space as part of a Blue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-203607","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}