He spent 20 years at SpaceX. Now, he’s making history with its biggest competitor

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — A Blue Origin rocket is set to launch Thursday carrying an unconventional passenger in a history-making moment made possible by a high-profile former employee of the company’s biggest rival.

Michaela Benthaus, an aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency, will ride aboard the mission, known as NS-37, and become the first wheelchair user to travel to space. The unprecedented opportunity came together after encounter between Benthaus and Hans Koenigsmann, a former executive at SpaceX — Blue Origin’s chief competitor.

Koenigsmann, like Benthaus, is German, and the two of them were chatting during an event in Munich last year when Benthaus wondered aloud if she would ever be able to realize her dream of spaceflight in spite of a spinal cord injury that had left her unable to walk.

Koenigsmann then began quietly conspiring to make it happen.

“She said she was only thinking about a suborbital flight,” Koenigsmann told CNN on Monday. While SpaceX offers multimillion-dollar rides to Earth orbit, Blue Origin offers brief trips to suborbital space, so Koenigsmann called up his former competitor. “They responded really, really well to us,” he said.

Koenigsmann and Benthaus are now slated to fly as a team, alongside four other passengers, aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. Similar flights have so far carried more than 80 people, including Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, singer Katy Perry and famed “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, on 10-minute trips to the edge of space — traveling high enough to surpass the Kármán Line, which is a common demarcation line for space that lies 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level.

“When Hans told me, ‘Blue is excited about this,’ I was like, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you understood them correctly?’” Benthaus told CNN Tuesday. “I always wanted to go to space, but I never really considered it something which I could actually do.”

The crew is set to launch as soon as Thursday at 10 a.m. CT (11 a.m. ET) from Blue Origin’s facilities near the remote town of Van Horn, Texas. The company will livestream the flight on its website.

Embracing uncertainty

During the brief, suborbital flight, Koenigsmann will serve as Benthaus’ companion — stepping in to assist her should the need arise.

If all goes as planned, Benthaus will be able to enter and exit the 15-foot-wide New Shepard capsule on her own, using a small bench.

Benthaus will also use a strap to keep her legs bound together — preventing them from splaying wildly as passengers exit their seats to briefly float in weightlessness at the top of the flight path. (Blue Origin flights typically offer passengers three or four minutes of zero gravity.)

She hopes to be able to return to her seat without issue, though Koenigsmann is prepared to lend a hand.

Koenigsmann will also help Benthaus in the event of an emergency that requires a speedy exit from the spacecraft.

“Blue Origin is super well prepared,” Benthaus said, noting that she and Koenigsmann previously traveled to the company’s Texas facilities twice to hash out specific accommodations for this flight.

‘Way too disabled’?

Advocates have long pointed out that space travel can be an ideal adventure for people with disabilities, as weightlessness can offer the chance to move about unbridled by gravity.

While no one with a mobility-limiting disability has yet traveled to space, there have been several notable strides forward in recent years. In 2021, Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who has a titanium prosthesis in her leg, spent three days in orbit as part of an experimental civilian space mission. And John McFall, a Paralympian with a prosthetic leg who works for the European Space Agency, this year became the first person with a physical disability ever to be medically cleared to fly to the International Space Station. (McFall has not yet flown to space.)

But Benthaus worried that her condition — a spinal cord injury from a 2018 mountain bike accident — might preclude her from achieving the same milestones.

“Maybe space is for people who have an amputated leg but still can walk a little bit,” Benthaus said she had wondered. “Maybe having a spinal cord injury is way too disabled.”

When she reaches space aboard the Blue Origin flight, it could quash similar doubts from others who have longed to experience spaceflight but are confined to a wheelchair.

Still, Benthaus said, she recognizes it may be years before trips to space are a regular occurrence for people like her.

“In my case, Blue Origin is adapting the whole procedures,” Benthaus said, acknowledging that such accommodations are not always possible.

“I think for a person with a spinal cord injury, we need to open our minds more and be willing to change existing systems,” she said of what would be needed to allow more people with disabilities to reach Earth orbit and beyond.

Of course, Benthaus added, there are financial issues as well. Most people do not have the means to purchase a seat on any of the currently available commercial space tourism vehicles. Blue Origin does not disclose its ticket prices, but based on what its competitor Virgin Galactic charges, the experience likely costs several hundred thousand dollars.

“I got lucky that I met Hans (Koenigsmann),” Benthaus said, adding that he and Blue Origin are supporting the mission.

A dramatic exit from SpaceX

Koenigsmann is something of a legend at SpaceX. As one of its earliest employees, he developed the avionics for the company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, in the early 2000s.

He later became SpaceX’s head of build and flight reliability and often served as the face of the company, appearing on its behalf at news conferences as SpaceX evolved into a globally dominant force in the commercial space industry.

But in 2021, Koenigsmann walked away from SpaceX. Walter Isaacson wrote in a recent biography of Elon Musk that the volatile SpaceX CEO disliked a report that Koenigsmann wrote about an ill-fated test flight of one of the company’s rocket prototypes in 2020.

The test flight, called SN8, ran afoul of federal regulators because the company moved forward with the launch without obtaining weather clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration. And in his report about the incident, Koeningsmann wanted SpaceX to take accountability, he told Issacson.

“But my interpretation did not agree with Elon’s interpretation,” Koeningsmann told CNN. “We were both stubborn.”

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the matter.

After the ordeal, Musk had asked Koeningsmann to retire, and Koeningsmann ultimately ended his nearly 20-year tenure at the company in 2021.

“I still love SpaceX,” Koeningsmann said. “I still think (Musk) helped me a lot in my career, and did a lot of things for me.”

Achieving the impossible

Koeningsmann said he recognizes the optics are somewhat strange, with a former executive of SpaceX opting to travel to space for the first time with the company’s biggest competitor.

But he told CNN he views this mission as one that lives outside the bounds of competition.

“I think the competition is good in general. There should be competition,” Koeningsmann said. “It shouldn’t always be as personal as it sometimes is.”

For her part, Benthaus said she’s thrilled to make this symbolic foray into space for wheelchair users.

She has also enjoyed a mostly positive reception to the news of her spaceflight. People with and without disabilities have reached out to praise her.

A few, however, have been antagonistic, questioning why space companies should work to accommodate people with disabilities.

To those detractors, Benthaus has two things to say.

First, “we’re thinking more and more about long-duration space missions; some of us want to go to the Mars in the future,” she said. “That’s a very long journey. And — yes — people can get a disability on the way. People can have a stroke or break their leg or get a spinal cord injury.”

In such a scenario, an injured astronaut can’t simply return to Earth for help. So, a prior understanding of how a person with a physical disability might navigate space travel will be extremely important.

The second reason, Benthaus said, is that “most of us want to be an inclusive society” — and not only because it’s the right thing to do.

“People with disabilities actually bring value to a crew. People that have had an accident — that’s a lot one has to go through,” she said. “You develop a very special resilience.”

As part of her flight, Benthaus is raising money for the spinal cord injury research nonprofit Wings for Life.

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