Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk, one of the 13 women who passed Nasa’s astronaut training program in the 1960s, on the first crewed flight into space from his rocket company Blue Origin later this month. Bezos’ company Blue Origin said in an announcement on Thursday Wally Funk will be aboard the July 20 launch from West Texas, flying in the capsule as an “honored guest.”
She will join Jeff Bezos, his brother and the winner of a $28 million charity auction, as the first people to ride a New Shepard rocket. At 82, Funk will be the oldest person ever to travel into space, Blue Origin said in an announcement on Thursday.
Wally Funk said she feels “fabulous” about finally getting the chance to go to space–after six decades of acing astronaut tests but barred because she was a woman. “I didn’t think I would ever get to go up,” Funk said in a video interview posted on the company’s website.
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“I’ll love every second of it. Whoooo! Ha-ha. I can hardly wait. Nothing has ever gotten in my way. They said, ‘Well, you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’ 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 has ever done,” Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos.
‘It’s time’
“No one has waited longer. It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally,” Bezos, who is stepping down as the chief executive of Amazon on July 5, said via Instagram.
Wally Funk will beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Glenn dismissed the idea of women flying in space, shortly after he became the first American to orbit the world in 1962.
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Funk at 21 was the youngest of the 13 women who passed the same rigorous physical tests as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in Nasa’s program that first sent Americans into space between 1961 and 1963. All of the women passed but they were denied the chance to become astronauts themselves because of their gender. The Russians went on to launch Valentina Tereshkova—the first woman into space—in 1963.
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“They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys. So I got hold of Nasa four times. I said I want to become an astronaut, but nobody would take me. I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up,” Wally Funk said.
Funk was the first woman inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first woman air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. She said she has 19,600 flying hours and has taught more than 3,000 people to fly.
Wally Funk also reserved a seat years ago on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket ship and remains on the passenger list.
(With agency inputs)
