A paraplegic engineer from Germany took off Saturday on a rocket ride that made her dream come true, leaving her wheelchair behind to float in space as she gazed down at Earth from above.

Severely injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago, Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user in space, launching from West Texas with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company. She was accompanied by a retired SpaceX executive, also born in Germany, Hans Koenigsmann, who helped organize and, along with Blue Origin, sponsored her trip. Their ticket prices were not disclosed.

An ecstatic Benthaus said she laughed all the way up—the capsule soared more than 105 kilometers (65 miles)—and attempted to stand upside down in space.

“It was the coolest experience,” she said shortly after landing.

The 10-minute spaceflight required only minor adjustments to accommodate Benthaus, according to the company. That's because the autonomous New Shepard capsule was designed with accessibility in mind, “making it more accessible to a wider range of people than traditional spaceflight,” said Blue Origin's Jake Mills, an engineer who trained the crew and assisted them on launch day.

Among Blue Origin's previous space tourists: people with limited mobility and reduced vision or hearing, and a couple of people in their 90s.

For Benthaus, Blue Origin added a patient transfer board so he could slide between the capsule hatch and his seat. The recovery team also had a mat to place on the desert floor after landing, providing immediate access to his wheelchair, which he left behind upon takeoff. He practiced beforehand, with Koenigsmann participating in the design and testing. There was already an elevator on the launch pad to ascend the seven floors to the capsule at the top of the rocket.

Benthaus, 33, part of the European Space Agency's graduate training program in the Netherlands, experienced fragments of weightlessness during a parabolic plane flight from Houston in 2022. Less than two years later, he participated in a two-week simulated space mission in Poland.

“I never really thought that going on a space flight would be a real option for me because even as a super healthy person, it's so competitive, right?” he told The Associated Press before the flight.

His accident ended any hope he had. “There is no history of people with disabilities flying into space,” she said.

When Koenigsmann called her last year about the possibility of flying on Blue Origin and experiencing more than three minutes of weightlessness in a space jump, Benthaus thought there might be a misunderstanding. But there wasn't one, and he accepted immediately.

It's a private mission for Benthaus with no involvement from the space agency, 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 cannot walk at all, unlike McFall, who uses a prosthetic leg and could evacuate a space capsule in an emergency by landing himself. Koenigsmann was designated before the flight as his emergency assistant; He and Mills lifted her out of the capsule and carried her down the short flight of stairs at the end of the flight.

“You should never give up on your dreams, right?” Benthaus urged after landing.

Benthaus was adamant about doing everything she could for herself. His goal is to make not only space accessible to the disabled, but also to improve accessibility on Earth.

While he receives a lot of positive feedback within “my space bubble,” he said the outside ones aren't always as inclusive.

“I really hope it's opening up for people like me, as I hope it's just the beginning,” he said.

In addition to Koenigsmann, Benthaus shared the trip with business executives and investors, and a computer scientist. They increased Blue Origin's list of space travelers to 86.

Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, created Blue Origin in 2000 and launched its first passenger space flight in 2021. Since then, the company has sent spacecraft into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, using the larger, more powerful New Glenn rocket, and is working to send landers to the moon.

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The Associated Press receives support for its health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for the content.

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This story was translated from English by an AP editor using a generative artificial intelligence tool.