Wally Funk — 1939-2026
Wally Funk waited over 60 years for a few fleeting moments of weightlessness. An accomplished pilot, she longed to go to space from the moment in 1960 when she heard of a private program that put female pilots through the same astronaut fitness tests that the men were taking. At 22, Funk was the youngest of the Mercury 13, the group of women who passed the grueling physical challenges, and she was one of just two to go through two more phases of testing, including spending over 10 hours in an isolation tank. NASA didn’t sanction the program, though, and it barred women from astronaut training. Funk wouldn’t reach space for another six decades. In 2021, at age 82, she joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on his rocket company Blue Origin’s first crewed flight. At the time, she was the oldest person to reach space; Funk remains the oldest woman to do it. The spacecraft took her up over 60 miles to the edge of space in a flight that lasted just 10 minutes. Back on land, she spread her arms and said, “I want to go again, fast!”
Mary Wallace Funk grew up in New Mexico with parents who encouraged her daring exploits. At 5, she leaped from her barn’s roof in a cape and crashed into a haystack. “Her fascination with flying was undiminished,” said The New York Times, and while attending Oklahoma State she earned licenses to fly planes, gliders, and seaplanes. At age 20, she became the first female flight instructor at a military base—commercial airlines wouldn’t hire her, using the pretext that their facilities lacked a women’s bathroom—and later became the first female safety inspector for the U.S. government, investigating some 450 crashes. Yet “hanging over these accomplishments was her unfulfilled dream of becoming an astronaut,” said The Guardian. She applied four times, but by the time Sally Ride flew on the space shuttle in 1983, Funk was 44 and considered too old.
Still, she continued astronaut training on her own, alongside her pilot career, “undergoing centrifuge tests, entering a high-altitude chamber, and visiting a Russian training site to experience zero-gravity conditions,” said The Washington Post. She ultimately logged 19,000 hours flying, taught over 3,000 pilots, and took part in numerous flying competitions. “They said, ‘Wally, you’re a girl, you can’t do that!’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Guess what: Doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it.’”
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