A person who uses a wheelchair blasted into space for the first time Saturday, taking a short ride on a Blue Origin flight.
The space company, owned by American multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its New Shepard suborbital mission at 8:15 a.m. (1415 GMT) from its Texas site.
Michaela Benthaus, a German aerospace and mechatronics engineer with the European Space Agency, was among the passengers who crossed the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, during the approximately 10-minute flight.
Benthaus suffered a spinal cord injury after a mountain bike accident and now uses a wheelchair.
“After my accident, I really, really found out how inaccessible our world still is” to people with disabilities, she said in a video released by the company.
“If we want to be an inclusive society, we should be inclusive in all parts, and not just in the parts we like to be,” Benthaus added.
The small, fully automatic rocket took off vertically, and the capsule containing the tourists then detached in flight before gently falling back to the Texas desert, slowed by parachutes.
It was the 16th crewed 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 the flights at a time when private space companies are vying for supremacy.
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 completed two unmanned orbital flights using its massive New Glenn rocket, which is significantly more powerful than the New Shepard.
