Blue Origin postpones the first spaceflight of a wheelchair user due to technical snag at the pad

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has delayed the first flight of a wheelchair user into space due to a technical issue that came to light just before today’s scheduled launch.

The countdown for Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard mission was terminated nearly an hour after the launch window opened at 10 a.m. CT (8 a.m. PT) at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. Blue Origin didn’t specify the nature of the glitch. Launch commentator Tabitha Lukin said only that the flight team “observed an issue with our built-in checks prior to flight.”

“We are assessing our next opportunity for launch,” she said.

This will be the 37th New Shepard mission, and the 16th to carry humans on a brief ride above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude level that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Eighty people have previously flown on New Shepard, including Bezos. Six have gone multiple times.

The six-person crew for the mission, known as NS-37, includes Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, a German-born aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency who sustained a spinal cord injury in a mountain biking accident in 2018.

In a 2023 interview published by the Technical University of Munich, Benthaus said that she’s always been “mega fascinated” by space, and set her mind on becoming an astronaut when she was 10 years old.

When Benthaus lost the use of her legs, she initially thought her flight into space “was never going to happen.” But in 2022, her hopes got a big boost when she experienced a zero-G flight arranged through AstroAccess, a project that’s dedicated to paving the way for spacefliers with disabilities. Last year, she was the commander of an analog space mission conducted at the Lunares Research Station in Poland.

Now the 33-year-old is on the verge of blazing a new trail for space access.

“This feels like an important step, since space travel for people with disabilities is still in its very early days,” Benthaus said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m so thankful and hope it inspires a change in mindset across the space industry, creating more opportunities for people like me. I might be the first — but have no intention of being the last.”

Blue Origin has been working for several years to improve accessibility at its New Shepard facilities — for example, by adding an elevator to the seven-story launch tower. A business resource group named New Hawking, in honor of the late wheelchair-using physicist Stephen Hawking, has helped lead the way.

During their flight, Benthaus and the rest of the NS-37 crew will experience a few minutes of zero-gravity and views of a curving Earth against the blackness of space. At the end of the ride, the booster will make an autonomous landing while the crew capsule descends to a parachute-assisted touchdown in the West Texas desert.

Benthaus’ crewmates include:

• Joey Hyde, a physicist and quantitative investor who recently retired from his career at Citadel, a leading hedge fund. He lives in Florida with his wife and five children.
• Hans Koenigsmann, a German-American aerospace engineer whose career has been dedicated to advancing reusable spacecraft and launch vehicles, most notably as an early team member at SpaceX.
• Neal Milch, a business executive and entrepreneur who launched his career through Laundrylux, a family-owned business. He now serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research institute.
• Adonis Pouroulis, an entrepreneur, investor and mining engineer with more than 30 years of experience in the natural resources and energy sector. He is the founder and chairman of Pella Resources, co-founder of Energy Revolution Ventures, chairman of Rainbow Rare Earths, and the CEO of Chariot Limited.
• Jason Stansell, a computer scientist and a self-proclaimed space nerd rooted in West Texas. He’s been watching from a front-row seat as the space industry has expanded to offer opportunities for commercial spaceflight. 

In addition to the crew, NS-37 will be carrying more than 20,000 postcards submitted by students and others through a program organized by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s nonprofit educational foundation. The featured partners for this latest batch of postcards are UNIQLO, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda Rocket Day and Give Kids the World Village.

Blue Origin typically doesn’t reveal how much people pay to take trips on New Shepard. In some cases, crew members have flown as invited guests. On the other end of the spectrum, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $28 million for a ticket in a widely publicized auction.

The suborbital space program’s previous milestones include flying the world’s oldest spaceflier (former test pilot Ed Dwight, who was 90 when he rode on New Shepard last year); the world’s youngest spaceflier (Oliver Daemen, who was 18 when he flew with Bezos and two others in 2021). and the first married couple to reach the final frontier together on a commercial spaceship (Marc and Sharon Hagle in 2022).