Blue Origin completes first space flight with wheelchair user

Sana Pashankar, Bloomberg News on Dec 20, 2025

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin completed a suborbital joyride Saturday with a six-person crew, including the first wheelchair user to reach space and one of SpaceX’s first engineers.

The flight took off at about 9:15 a.m. ET, and the capsule landed roughly 11 minutes later in West Texas.

The mission was initially slated to occur on Dec. 18 before the company postponed it due to an unspecified issue found during preflight checks.

The launch marked the 16th human spaceflight for Bezos’ tourism company using New Shepard, a small craft built to send people on short trips to the edge of space, as well as to conduct research missions.

The passengers included Michaela Benthaus, an aerospace engineer at the European Space Agency who was injured during a mountain biking accident in 2018. Hans Koenigsmann worked at SpaceX for two decades, most recently as the company’s vice president of avionics, before retiring in 2021.

While Blue Origin doesn’t disclose its price for a seat on one of its tourism flights, rival space tourism company Virgin Galactic charges around $600,000 for a similar experience.

In April, pop star Katy Perry, Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sánchez and CBS News host Gayle King took the flight, becoming part of the first all-female crew to go to space in more than 60 years.

The company also operates its much larger, heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which is capable of delivering spacecraft and satellites to orbit and beyond.

Blue Origin completed a successful second flight of New Glenn in November, in which the rocket deployed two Mars-bound NASA spacecraft and nailed the landing of its reusable booster on a barge in the Atlantic.