{"id":244354,"date":"2025-12-21T13:50:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T13:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/244354\/"},"modified":"2025-12-21T13:50:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T13:50:09","slug":"german-engineer-becomes-first-wheelchair-user-in-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/244354\/","title":{"rendered":"German engineer becomes first wheelchair user in space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A German engineer has become the first wheelchair user to go to space as part of a Blue Origin mission.<\/p>\n<p>Jeff Bezos&#8217; aerospace firm Blue Origin marked the historic milestone on 20 December after launching the first wheelchair user above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line &#8211; the internationally recognised boundary of space.<\/p>\n<p>German aerospace engineer Michaela Benthaus, an engineer with the European Space Agency, sustained a spinal cord injury after a mountain biking accident in 2018 and has since become an advocate for accessible space travel.<\/p>\n<p>She and her fellow passengers Joey Hyde, Hans Koenigsmann, Neal Milch, Adonis Pouroulis, and Jason Stansel blasted off into space aboard a Blue Origin New Shephard rocket.<\/p>\n<p>The crew experienced a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth via parachute-assisted landing in the West Texas desert.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think you should never give up on your dreams, right? I mean, there&#8217;s also sometimes just a low probability that it comes true. And I just got very lucky,&#8221; Ms Benthaus said upon landing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A German engineer has become the first wheelchair user to go to space as part of a Blue&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[18,19,17,133,451],"class_list":{"0":"post-244354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115757883206691715","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}