This Aerospace Engineer Just Became the First Wheelchair User to Travel to Space
A brief commercial flight with space tourism company Blue Origin made Michaela “Michi” Benthaus’ childhood dream come true
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Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, a 33-year-old aerospace engineer from Germany, just made history as the first wheelchair user to travel to space.
Benthaus joined a roughly ten-minute commercial flight aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft that launched from West Texas on December 20. The crew capsule passed the Kármán Line—the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space located around 62 miles above the planet’s surface—and then turned back.
“It was the coolest experience ever, honestly,” she says in a livestreamed video after emerging from the capsule. “I think you should never give up on your dreams.”
Seven years ago, Benthaus suffered from a spinal cord injury during a mountain biking accident. She assumed the disability would dash her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.
“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?” Benthaus told the Associated Press’ Marcia Dunn ahead of the flight. “There is like no history of people with disabilities flying to space.”
But space tourism company Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has been working to change that. During its 16 human spaceflight missions, including the most recent one, the New Shepard program has flown people with blindness, low vision, hearing difficulties, limb differences or mobility limitations, per a statement from the company.
Quick fact: Another famous spaceflight from Blue Origin
Blue Origin's New Shepard program hosted another well-known spaceflight on April 14: a heavily promoted all-women flight—the first in more than 60 years—that included Katy Perry, Gayle King and Amanda Nguyễn, the first Vietnamese woman to go to space, among others.
Benthaus’ flight adventure began with a message on LinkedIn, she says in a Blue Origin social media video. She reached out to Hans Koenigsmann, an aerospace engineer and retired executive at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company. She asked him if people with physical disabilities like her could be astronauts.
He then contacted Blue Origin and ended up organizing and sponsoring Benthaus’ trip—which he also joined—although the company did not disclose ticket prices, reports the New York Times’ Adeel Hassan. (A similar flight with the space tourism company Virgin Galactic costs $600,000, per the outlet.)
Blue Origin’s New Shepard system is designed to let passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness in a suborbital flight, in which the rocket isn’t traveling fast enough to orbit around Earth, so it falls back to the planet. Before the trip, Benthaus told told CNN’s Jackie Wattles that she planned to tie her legs together with a strap so they wouldn’t move too much when she and the other passengers were floating. Blue Origin also added a platform to the capsule so Benthaus could move between the door and her seat, according to AP.
The December 20 flight welcomed four other crewmates: Joey Hyde, a retired physicist and quantitative investor; Neal Milch, a business executive and entrepreneur; Adonis Pouroulis, an entrepreneur and mining engineer; and Jason Stansell, a computer scientist.
Benthaus, who works at the European Space Agency, told CNN that her experience can help improve future spaceflights for other passengers with physical disabilities. “If we want to be an inclusive society, we should be inclusive in every part, and not only in the parts we like to be,” she says in the social media video.
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