At 82 Funk realised a six-decades long dream to reach space as she completed her first flight onboard Blue Origin's New Shepard.
Wally Funk stands amid her fellow crew of New Shepard’s first human flight | Image from Blue Origins
On July 20 Wally Funk became the oldest person to fly in space. Funk, 82, joined executive chairman of Amazon Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and 18 year old Oliver Daemen on New Shepard’s first human flight — Daemen is the youngest person to fly in space.
Funk’s journey to space began in the 1960s when she was the youngest graduate of the Woman in Space Program, a privately-funded project which tested female pilots for astronaut fitness — the program that would come to be known as “Mercury 13” where thirteen American women successfully underwent the same physiological and psychological screening tests as the astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury, but never flew to space.
Funk was also, in the United States, the first female Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector and first female National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) air safety investigator.
New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard the first American to go to space, is Blue Origin’s reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line — the internationally recognised boundary of space.
Blue Origin is a privately funded American aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company founded by Jeff Bezos.
