Blue Origin makes history by sending a person in a wheelchair to space

Washington – Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, made history this Saturday by sending a person in a wheelchair into space for the first time on a commercial flight. Michaela «Michi» Benthaus became the first passenger with reduced mobility to travel beyond the Kármán line, located about 100 kilometers above Earth and internationally recognized as the space boundary. According to Blue Origin on the social network X, this is “another step towards the accessibility of space travel for all.” Benthaus, an aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency who suffered a spinal cord injury after a mountain biking accident in 2018, was part of a six-member mission called ‘Out of the Blue’. “I’m excited to show the world that people in wheelchairs can also perform a suborbital flight, and I’m very happy that Blue Origin is supporting it,” she said.

In total, the space mission lasted approximately 10 minutes, and its participants spent several of those minutes in microgravity before returning safely to the Earth’s surface. Blue Origin warned that it was not necessary to modify either the launch tower or the crew capsule to adapt them to the needs of a person with a disability because they were already designed taking these specificities into account. Bezos’ company has already taken dozens of space tourists beyond the Kármán line on missions lasting between 10 and 11 minutes. One of its most media-covered missions included a crew composed only of women, in which the now-wife of the founder of Amazon, Lauren Sánchez, and the singer Katy Perry participated.