A paraplegic engineer from Germany achieved a lifelong dream on Saturday, joining five other passengers on a remarkable rocket journey. Leaving her wheelchair behind, she experienced the weightlessness of space while gazing down at Earth.

Michaela Benthaus, who became the first wheelchair user to venture into space, launched from West Texas with Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos. Severely injured in a mountain biking accident seven years ago, Benthaus was accompanied by Hans Koenigsmann, a retired SpaceX executive also from Germany. Koenigsmann helped organize and sponsor the trip alongside Blue Origin. The cost of their tickets remains undisclosed.

The 10-minute suborbital flight required minimal modifications for Benthaus, thanks to the autonomous New Shepard capsule’s design that prioritizes accessibility. “Our aim is to make space travel more inclusive than traditional methods,” explained Jake Mills, an engineer at Blue Origin who trained the crew and provided support during the launch.

Blue Origin has previously flown space tourists with varying degrees of mobility and sensory impairments, including individuals in their 90s.

To facilitate Benthaus’s journey, Blue Origin incorporated a patient transfer board for easy movement between the capsule’s hatch and her seat. After landing in the desert, a carpet was deployed for her to quickly access her wheelchair, which she left behind at liftoff. Benthaus practiced these procedures in advance, with Koenigsmann actively participating in the design and testing phases. An elevator was also available at the launch pad to transport her seven stories up to the rocket’s capsule.

Benthaus, 33, part of the European Space Agency’s graduate trainee program in the Netherlands, experienced snippets of weightlessness during a parabolic airplane flight out of Houston in 2022. Less than two years later, she took part in a two-week simulated space mission in Poland.

“I never really thought that going on a spaceflight would be a real option for me because even as like a super healthy person, it’s like so competitive, right?” she told The Associated Press ahead of the flight.

Her accident dashed whatever hope she had. “There is like no history of people with disabilities flying to space,” she said.

When Koenigsmann approached her last year about the possibility of flying on Blue Origin and experiencing more than three minutes of weightlessness on a space hop, Benthaus thought there might be a misunderstanding. But there wasn’t, and she immediately signed on.

It’s a private mission for Benthaus with no involvement by ESA, which this year cleared reserve astronaut John McFall, an amputee, for a future flight to the International Space Station. The former British Paralympian lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident when he was a teenager.

An injured spinal cord means Benthaus can’t walk at all, unlike McFall who uses a prosthetic leg and could evacuate a space capsule in an emergency at touchdown by himself. Koenigsmann was designated before flight as her emergency helper; he also was tapped to help her out of the capsule and down the short flight of steps at flight’s end.

Benthaus was adamant about doing as much as she could by herself. Her goal is to make not only space accessible to the disabled, but to improve accessibility on Earth too.

While getting lots of positive feedback within “my space bubble,” she said outsiders aren’t always as inclusive.

“I really hope it’s opening up for people like me, like I hope I’m only the start,” she said.

Besides Koenigsmann, Benthaus shared the ride with business executives and investors, and a computer scientist. They raised Blue Origin’s list of space travelers to 86.

Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, created Blue Origin in 2000 and launched on its first passenger spaceflight in 2021. The company has since delivered spacecraft to orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, using the bigger and more powerful New Glenn rocket, and is working to send landers to the moon.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.