{"id":329581,"date":"2025-12-22T10:21:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T10:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/329581\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T10:21:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T10:21:16","slug":"a-crash-put-her-in-a-wheelchair-it-didnt-stop-her-going-to-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/329581\/","title":{"rendered":"A crash put her in a wheelchair. It didn\u2019t stop her going to space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michaela Benthaus had wanted to leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere for as long as she could remember \u2014 at least since watching Star Wars as a child. <\/p>\n

After finishing school in Bavaria she moved across the Austrian border to study mechatronics in Linz as preparation for a career in the space sector. <\/p>\n

Then her other great obsession appeared to ruin everything: in 2018, on a downhill biking route in Spicak, Czech Republic, she crashed, damaged her spinal cord and lost the use of her legs. It was the day, she once said, that \u201cI threw my life away\u201d. <\/p>\n

Seven years later Benthaus, now 33 and a European Space Agency engineer, has become the first paraplegic person and the first wheelchair user to visit space. \u201cHonestly, that was the coolest experience of all time,\u201d she said after a brief suborbital test flight arranged by the American company Blue Origin. <\/p>\n

\"NS-37<\/p>\n

Michaela Benthaus and fellow astronauts<\/p>\n

FELIX KUNZE<\/p>\n

\"Michaela<\/p>\n

She laughed throughout the 11-minute ascent<\/p>\n

It was the culmination of years of patient effort. After her crash she resumed studies at Linz and then took a master\u2019s in aerospace engineering and astronautics at the Technical University of Munich, specialising in physics and Earth-monitoring satellites. <\/p>\n

In 2022 she secured a place on a parabolic flight, a form of astronaut training that imitates microgravity, from Houston. Two years after that she took part in an \u201canalogue\u201d space mission at the Lunares research station in Poland, where crews are isolated in a space station simulator. <\/p>\n

German engineer becomes first wheelchair user to go into space<\/p>\n

The Blue Origin flight from the Texas desert was on a different level. In recent years the company, which was set up by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has taken a series of unorthodox astronauts into space, including partially blind people, the pop star Katy Perry<\/a> and a 90-year-old William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek.<\/p>\n

\u2022 William Shatner on going to space: \u2018My grandkids said it was cool\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Benthaus\u2019s trip was at least partly sponsored by Hans K\u00f6nigsmann, a distinguished German aerospace engineer who worked for almost two decades at SpaceX<\/a>, Blue Origin\u2019s main rival.<\/p>\n

\"Michaela<\/p>\n

Michaela Benthaus and Hans K\u00f6nigsmann, who helped sponsor her flight and was one of the crew<\/p>\n

BLUE ORIGIN VIA AP<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought my dream of going to space had ended for ever when I had my accident,\u201d Benthaus wrote on LinkedIn before the flight. \u201cBut over the past few months, I\u2019ve been working with an amazing and supportive team to make it possible for a wheelchair user to take part in a suborbital flight, something that\u2019s never been done before \u2026 I might be the first, but I have no intention of being the last.\u201d<\/p>\n

The launch tower for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard vehicle is already fitted with a lift but technicians added a patient transfer board \u2014 effectively a kind of lightweight bridge \u2014 so that Benthaus could slide from the entry hatch to her seat.<\/p>\n

Over 11 minutes, the capsule rose to a height of 65 miles, just above the Karman line, which is generally held to mark the boundary of outer space. Benthaus said she had laughed throughout the ascent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michaela Benthaus had wanted to leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere for as long as she could remember \u2014 at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-329581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}