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’ company Blue Origin. 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 divulged.

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

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

The 10-minute space-skimming flight 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: those with limited mobility and impaired sight or hearing, and a pair of 90-year-olds.

For Benthaus, Blue Origin added a patient transfer board so she could scoot between the capsule’s hatch and her seat. The recovery team also unrolled a carpet on the desert floor following touchdown, providing immediate access to her wheelchair, which she left behind at liftoff. She practiced in advance, with Koenigsmann taking part with the design and testing. An elevator was already in place at the launch pad to ascend the seven stories to the capsule perched atop the rocket.

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 and Mills lifted her out of the capsule and down the short flight of steps at flight’s end.

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

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 pow

It would be one of the biggest build-outs in the U.S. to meet the insatiable electricity demand from developers of artificial intelligence. The construction cost would be $16.3 billion, but staff members say customers will pay $50 billion to $60 billion over coming decades, including interest costs and guaranteed profit for the monopoly utility.

Georgia Power Co. and the Public Service Commission pledge large users will more than pay for their costs, and that spreading fixed costs over more customers, could help significantly cut residents’ power bills beginning in 2029.

“Large energy users are paying more so families and small businesses can pay less, and that’s a great result for Georgians,” Georgia Power CEO Kim Greene said in a statement after the vote.

But opponents say the five elected Republicans on the commission are greenlighting a risky bet by the utility to chase data center customers with existing ratepayers left holding the bag if demand doesn’t materialize.

“The need for 10,000 megawatts of new capacity resources on the system in the next six years isn’t here,” said Bob Sherrier, a lawyer representing some opponents. “It just isn’t, and it may never be.”

The approval came less than two months after voters rebuked GOP leadership, ousting two incumbent Republicans on the commission in favor of Democrats by overwhelming margins. Those two Democrats won in campaigns that centered on six Georgia Power rate increases commissioners have allowed in recent years, even though the company agreed to a three-year rate freeze in July.

Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson — the Democrats who will take office Jan. 1 — opposed Friday’s vote. But current commissioners refused to delay.

Electric bills have emerged as a potent political issue in Georgia and nationwide, with grassroots opposition to data centers partly based on fears that other customers will subsidize power demands of technology behemoths.

Georgia Power is the largest unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. It says it needs 10,000 megawatts of new capacity — enough to power 4 million Georgia homes — with 80% of that flowing to data centers. The company has 2.7 million customers today, including homes, businesses and industries.

Whether the company’s projections of a huge increase in demand will pan out has been the central argument. Georgia Power and commission staff agreed Dec. 9 to allow the company to build or acquire all the desired capacity, despite staff earlier saying the company’s forecast included too much speculative construction.

In return, the company agreed that after the current rate freeze ends in 2028, it would use revenue from new customers to place “downward pressure” on rates through 2031. That would amount to at least $8.50 a month, or $102 a year, for a typical residential customer. That customer currently pays more than $175 a month, including taxes.

“So we’re taking advantage of the upsides from this additional revenue, but allow it to shift the downside and the risk over to the company. And I’m real proud of that,” Commission Chairman Jason Shaw said after the vote.

But “downward pressure” doesn’t guarantee a rate decrease.

“It doesn’t mean your bills are going down,” said Liz Coyle, executive director of consumer group Georgia Watch. “It means that maybe they’re not going up as fast.”

Existing customers would pay for part of the construction program that doesn’t serve data centers. More importantly, opponents fear Georgia Power’s pledge of rate relief can’t be enforced, or won’t hold up over the 40-plus years needed to pay off new natural-gas fired power plants.

In a Monday news conference, Hubbard likened it to a mortgage “to build a massive addition to your home for a new roommate, big tech.”

“If in 10 years, the AI bubble bursts or the data centers move to a cheaper state, then the roommate moves out, but the mortgage doesn’t go away,” he said.

Staff members say the commission must watch demand closely and that if data centers don’t use as much power as projected, Georgia Power must drop agreements to purchase wholesale power, close its least efficient generating plants and seek additional customers.

Many opponents oppose any new generation fueled by natural gas, warning carbon emissions will worsen climate change. Some opponents were escorted out of the commission meeting by police after they began chanting “Nay! Nay! Nay! The people say nay!”

“Increased natural gas output for the sake of these silicon billionaire kings seems like a lose-lose,” opponent Zak Norton told commissioners Friday.