Funk into space.Ĭady Coleman, a NASA astronaut who served aboard the space shuttle and the space station, sees in the invitation a message to Ms. Bezos invited her as a way to one-up Richard Branson. It is hard not to look at the billionaire space-race and wonder if Mr. She purchased a ticket on Virgin Galactic in 2010 for $200,000, hoping that it would finally get her into space. “I was brought up that when things don’t work out, you go to your alternative,” she said. Funk has spent the past 60 years trying to find another way into space. Nor does Oliver Daemen, the 18-year-old high school graduate who will be riding up with her. By contrast, when the astronaut John Glenn was selected for the Mercury program, he also did not have an engineering degree. Over the years, she applied four times to be an astronaut and was turned down because she had never gotten an engineering degree. She applied to NASA twice in 1962 for the Gemini missions and again in 1966. She was the first female FAA inspector and first female NTSB air safety investigator. “If not today, then in a couple of months.” Wally was the youngest graduate of this program. I just believed it would come,” she said. Funk said that when she learned the program was canceled, she wasn’t discouraged. While Valentina Tereshkova went to space for the Soviet Union in 1963, NASA would not fly an American woman to orbit until 1983. government shut down the Woman in Space Program just as the Cold War space race was heating up. None of those women have gone into space. Funk excelled.Īll of these women were pilots who had logged hundreds or thousands of flight hours - in some cases more than the men who were selected for the astronaut program. She had fallen asleep.Īcross the board, the women who passed that initial round of testing did as well or better than their male counterparts, and of that group, Ms. Funk was in the tank for over 10 hours when the researchers finally brought her out because they wanted to go home. The range of tests included having ice water pumped into their ears to induce vertigo and being placed inside a sensory deprivation tank. They weren’t taking anyone under 24, but they took Ms. He wanted to put women through the same tests to see if they would be good candidates for space. Funk and 12 other women went through testing as part of the Woman in Space Program. In 1961, three years before Jeff Bezos was born, Ms. In all, she has logged over 19,600 flying hours and taught more than 3,000 people to fly. Funk flew at every opportunity, including sneaking out of a formal dance to go night flying.
WALLY FUNK LICENSE
That year she soloed and had her pilot’s license at 17. Funk said that during her first flight up, in a Cessna 172, “The bug bit and that was it.” In the book “Promised the Moon” by Stephanie Nolen, Ms. As she was recovering, a guidance counselor suggested that she take aviation classes to distract her.
By age 17, she already had a history of greeting “you can’t” with defiant proof that she could. Her path to space arguably begins with a ski accident in 1956 that crushed two of her vertebrae. That she was ultimately excluded from the first phase because she is a woman, and will now be included in the next one, also highlights difficult questions of whom space is for. Funk is one of the few people who has directly participated in both eras of human spaceflight so far - the one that started as an urgent race between rival nations, and the one that we are now transitioning into, in which private companies and the billionaires who finance them are in fierce competition for customers, comeuppance and contracts. But that is not what makes her so special. When on Tuesday she crosses that arbitrary altitude that divides the heavens from Earth below, in a rocket built by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, she’ll be 82, the oldest person ever to go into space.
We’re excited to have you fly with us on July 20th as our honored guest.Wally Funk is finally going to space. And with the New Shepard flight later this month, she will blaze yet another trail, becoming the oldest person to fly into space. Funk was the first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector and first female National Transportation Safety Board air safety investigator. Through a spokeswoman, Blue Origin declined to arrange an interview with Ms. “I said: ‘Guess what? Doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it.’ And I like to do things that nobody’s ever done.” “They said, ‘Well, you’re a girl, you can’t do that,’” she recalled in the video. But each of the four times she told NASA she wanted to become an astronaut, she was denied. “They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys,” Ms.
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