A paraplegic engineer from Germany became the first wheelchair user to rocket into space after a short ride on Saturday in which she felt weightlessness on a capsule that was launched from West Texas.
Michaela Benthaus, a 33-year-old aerospace engineer at the European Space Agency who injured her spinal cord in a mountain biking accident in 2018, was aboard the fully automated New Shepard rocket, along with five other passengers, when it launched at 8:15 a.m. local time.
The small craft with large windows, operated by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, sends tourists on short trips to the edge of space, allowing for a few minutes of weightlessness.
“It was the coolest experience ever, honestly,” she said in a video released by Blue Origin after her approximately 10-minute flight.
A beaming Ms. Benthaus said she was laughing during the approximately 65-mile climb, adding that she tried to turn upside down in the absence of gravity.
“I think you should never give up on your dreams,” she said. “There’s also sometimes just a low probability that it comes true, and I just got very lucky.”
It was the 16th human flight for the New Shepard program, which has previously flown 92 people, including repeat astronauts, above what is known as the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) above Earth.
“After my accident, I really, really figured out how inaccessible our world still is” for people with disabilities, she said in the video. “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.”
Ms. Benthaus was joined by Hans Koenigsmann, a retired executive with SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company. She said she contacted Mr. Koenigsmann, who is also from Germany, to ask if he thought someone like her could become an astronaut.
Mr. Koenigsmann helped organize and sponsor her trip, along with Blue Origin. The company does not disclose ticket prices, but a similar experience costs $600,000 aboard Virgin Galactic’s Spaceflight System, a rival space tourism company.
Blue Origin has sent dozens of people into space, including the pop singer Katy Perry, the broadcast journalist Gayle King, and the actor William Shatner.
Mr. Bezos has spent billions of dollars on Blue Origin and has spoken about how he envisions a future where humans live in colonies in space. He was on Blue Origin’s first suborbital passenger flight in 2021.
Last month, Blue Origin launched the second successful flight of its much larger New Glenn rocket, which can send spacecraft and satellites to orbit and beyond. The rocket deployed two NASA spacecraft bound for Mars.
The New Shepard rocket that launched on Saturday is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts who walked on the moon. New Glenn is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.
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