Wally Funk, the trailblazing pilot who outlasted the space agency's discrimination and finally reached orbit at 82, died Wednesday evening at her home in Grapevine, Texas. She was 87.
Funk passed peacefully at an assisted living facility, according to city councilwoman Duff O'Dell, who was at her side. Recent falls and a leg infection had taken their toll, O'Dell told the Associated Press.
Born February 1, 1939, Funk logged more than 19,600 flying hours and taught over 3,000 people to fly. She was the first female flight instructor at a U.S. military base and later became the first female aviation safety inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration, investigating crashes for both the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board. Well into her 80s, she was still teaching flying every Saturday.
But her greatest achievement came late in life, and only after decades of rejection.
In 1961, Funk volunteered for NASA's Women in Space program, a privately funded effort to test whether the nation's top female pilots could become astronauts. Thirteen women, soon dubbed the Mercury 13, endured the same battery of physical and psychological tests as NASA's all-male astronaut corps.
Funk was the youngest to complete the program. In one notorious test, she spent 10 hours and 35 minutes in sensory deprivation, outlasting even John Glenn, the legendary astronaut who would later become the first American to orbit Earth. Glenn himself opposed women in the space program, calling their inclusion "undesirable."
NASA never sanctioned the Mercury 13 program and ultimately canceled it. The agency instead selected seven men as its first astronauts, including Glenn and Alan Shepard. NASA didn't admit female astronauts until 1978, when Funk was already 39 years old.
Funk refused to quit. She applied to NASA four times, only to be rejected repeatedly. The agency told her she lacked an engineering degree. "I got a hold of Nasa four times, and said 'I want to become an astronaut', but nobody would take me," she said. "I didn't think I would ever get to go up."
She channeled her ambition into aviation, eventually owning a flying school in Taos, New Mexico. "Aviation has been my whole life," she wrote in her 2020 memoir. "I eat it, and I breathe it." In 2019, she told the Guardian she would never stop flying. "I'll be flying till I die," she declared.
In 2021, six decades after the Mercury 13 tests, Funk finally got her shot. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invited her as an honored guest aboard his Blue Origin rocket. At 82, she became the oldest person ever launched into space, a record she held briefly before actor William Shatner launched at 90 that same year. She remains the oldest woman to reach space.
The 11-minute flight was everything she'd dreamed of. "I want to go again, fast," Funk said at the post-flight news conference. "I loved every minute of it. I just wish it had been longer."
Blue Origin noted that Funk was the only one of the Mercury 13 to ever reach space. The company called her "a pioneer in every sense of the word."
Author James Rodriguez: "Wally Funk didn't wait for permission to change the world, and she damn sure didn't let her age stop her when the moment finally came."
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