Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, a 33-year-old paraplegic aerospace engineer from Germany, made history by becoming the first wheelchair user to travel to space on a Blue Origin suborbital flight. Benthaus, who was paralyzed in a 2018 mountain biking accident, flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket from West Texas with five other passengers and experienced weightlessness and views of Earth during the roughly 10-minute journey. To accommodate her needs, Blue Origin made minor accessibility adjustments — such as a patient transfer board and landing support — while the capsule’s design already lent itself to broad accessibility. After the flight, she left her wheelchair behind in the capsule and floated in microgravity, describing the experience as “the coolest” and expressing hope that her journey will inspire greater inclusion and accessibility in space travel and on Earth. Benthaus, who works with the European Space Agency as a trainee, emphasized that her mission is not just a personal milestone but a step toward broader opportunities for people with disabilities in space.
There’s a striking resonance between Michaela Benthaus’s flight and the science-fictional vision laid out in Waldo by Robert A. Heinlein. In that story, Waldo F. Jones is physically frail and disabled by gravity, yet becomes extraordinarily capable once technology reshapes the environment around him—especially in weightlessness, where his limitations dissolve and his ingenuity flourishes. Benthaus’s experience echoes this idea in a grounded, humane way: microgravity did not “fix” her, but it reframed what ability means, temporarily removing constraints imposed by Earth rather than by her body. Where Heinlein imagined a future in which access to space and adaptive technology unlocks latent human potential, Benthaus’s flight demonstrates that this future is no longer speculative. The comparison is not about heroics or overcoming disability, but about design, inclusion, and the quiet truth that when environments change, so does the definition of who can fully participate.
