A person in a wheelchair took off into space for the first time on Saturday, taking a short trip on a Blue Origin flight.
The space company owned by American billionaire Jeff Bezos launched its New Shepard suborbital mission at 8:15 a.m. (2:15 p.m. GMT) from its headquarters in Texas.
Michaela Benthaus, a German aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency, was among the passengers who crossed the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, during the roughly 10-minute flight.
Benthaus suffered a spinal cord injury after a mountain biking accident and now uses a wheelchair.
“After my accident, I really realized how inaccessible our world still is” for people with disabilities, he said in a video released by the company.
“If we want to be an inclusive society, we must be inclusive everywhere, and not just in the parts we like to be,” Benthaus added.
The small, fully automated rocket took off vertically and the capsule carrying the tourists detached in flight before descending gently back into the Texas desert, slowed by parachutes.
It was the 16th manned flight for Blue Origin, which for years has offered space tourism flights (the price is not public) using its New Shepard rocket.
Dozens of people have traveled to space with Blue Origin, including pop singer Katy Perry and William Shatner, who played Star Trek’s legendary Captain Kirk.
These high-profile guests aim to maintain public interest in flight at a time when private space companies compete for preeminence.
Virgin Galactic offers a similar suborbital flight experience.
But Blue Origin also has ambitions to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the orbital flight market.
This year, the Bezos company successfully carried out two unmanned orbital flights with its huge New Glenn rocket, which is much more powerful than the New Shepard.
