Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture added a page to the space history books today by sending the first wheelchair user into space.
“It was the coolest experience,” said Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, a German-born aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency who sustained a spinal cord injury in a mountain biking accident in 2018.
Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket ship lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:15 a.m. CT (6:15 a.m. PT).
An initial launch attempt had been called off on Thursday because the flight team “observed an issue with our built-in checks prior to flight,” Blue Origin said. It didn’t provide further details about the issue, but today’s countdown went off without a hitch.
This was the 37th New Shepard mission, and the 16th to carry humans on a brief ride above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude level that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Eighty-six people, including Bezos himself, have now flown on New Shepard. Six have gone multiple times.
Benthaus was one of six crew members on today’s mission, known as NS-37. In a 2023 interview published by the Technical University of Munich, she said she set her mind on becoming an astronaut when she was 10 years old.
When Benthaus lost the use of her legs, she initially thought her flight into space “was never going to happen.” But in 2022, her hopes got a big boost when she experienced a zero-G flight arranged through AstroAccess, a project that’s dedicated to paving the way for spacefliers with disabilities. Last year, she was the commander of an analog space mission conducted at the Lunares Research Station in Poland.
Now the 33-year-old has blazed a new trail for space access. “You should never give up on your dreams,” she said after today’s flight.
Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has been working for several years to improve accessibility at its New Shepard launch facility in Texas — for example, by adding an elevator to the seven-story launch tower. A business resource group named New Hawking, in honor of the late wheelchair-using physicist Stephen Hawking, helped lead the way.
Blue Origin didn’t need to make significant modifications in the New Shepard crew capsule for today’s flight. Launch commentator Joel Eby said the mission team made “a few ground system improvements,” such as providing a bench that Benthaus could use to get into and out of the capsule with assistance from others.
During their flight, Benthaus and the rest of the NS-37 crew experienced a few minutes of zero-gravity and views of a curving Earth against the blackness of space. At the end of the ride, the booster made an autonomous landing while the crew capsule descended to a parachute-assisted touchdown in the West Texas desert.
Afterward, Benthaus said she enjoyed the ride. “I tried to turn upside-down,” she said.
Benthaus’ crewmates included:
- Joey Hyde, a physicist and quantitative investor who recently retired from his career at Citadel, a leading hedge fund. He lives in Florida with his wife and five children.
- Hans Koenigsmann, a German-American aerospace engineer whose career has been dedicated to advancing reusable spacecraft and launch vehicles, most notably as an early team member at SpaceX. Koenigsmann played a supporting role in arranging Benthaus’ flight and occasionally helped her get around. After landing, Koenigsmann said the spaceflight was “actually more intense than I thought.”
- Neal Milch, a business executive and entrepreneur who launched his career through Laundrylux, a family-owned business. He now serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research institute.
- Adonis Pouroulis, an entrepreneur, investor and mining engineer with more than 30 years of experience in the natural resources and energy sector. He is the founder and chairman of Pella Resources, co-founder of Energy Revolution Ventures, chairman of Rainbow Rare Earths, and the CEO of Chariot Limited.
- Jason Stansell, a computer scientist and a self-proclaimed space nerd rooted in West Texas. He’s been watching from a front-row seat as the space industry has expanded to offer opportunities for commercial spaceflight.
In addition to the crew, NS-37 carried more than 20,000 postcards submitted by students and others through a program organized by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s nonprofit educational foundation. The featured partners for this latest batch of postcards were UNIQLO, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda Rocket Day and Give Kids the World Village.
Blue Origin typically doesn’t reveal how much people pay to take trips on New Shepard. In some cases, crew members have flown as invited guests. On the other end of the spectrum, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $28 million for a ticket in a widely publicized auction.
The suborbital space program’s previous milestones include flying the world’s oldest spaceflier (former test pilot Ed Dwight, who was 90 when he rode on New Shepard last year); the world’s youngest spaceflier (Oliver Daemen, who was 18 when he flew with Bezos and two others in 2021). and the first married couple to reach the final frontier together on a commercial spaceship (Marc and Sharon Hagle in 2022).
This is an updated version of a report first published on Dec. 18.
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