Jeff Bezos announces 82-year-old female pilot Wally Funk will launch into space with him

Editor’s Note: This story was first published on 2 July 2021 and has been republished as Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin crew will be launched into space today.  Mary Wallace Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who was prevented from becoming an astronaut in the 1960s because of her sex, will join Jeff Bezos on his rocket ship company’s first human flight into space, the company announced Thursday. [caption id=“attachment_9774291” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and Wally Funk. Image credit: Instagram/Jeff Bezos[/caption] On 20 July, she will join Bezos; his brother, Mark Bezos; and the winner of an auction as the first people to fly in a Blue Origin rocket and capsule, the company said in a statement. The mission will be a short suborbital flight, with the rocket rising above the 62-mile threshold generally regarded as the beginning of space, before returning to Earth. Passengers aboard the rocket, called New Shepard, will experience zero gravity for four minutes and then touch back down in the desert in West Texas, the site of the rocket’s launch.

Funk, who goes by Wally, was one of 13 American women who went through a rigorous astronaut-training program in the 1960s to determine whether women were fit for space. Despite testing just as well as men at the time, none ever became astronauts: The program was privately funded and not recognized by NASA. More important, NASA was accepting only trained fighter-jet pilots — a job open only to men — as candidates to become astronauts at that time, according to History.com. It wasn’t until 1983, five years after the fighter-pilot requirement was lifted, that the United States sent its first woman, Sally Ride, into space. “They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys,” Funk said in a video posted to Bezos’ Instagram account. But each of the four times she told NASA she wanted to become an astronaut, she was denied. “They said, ‘Well, you’re a girl, you can’t do that,’ ” she recalled in the video. “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.”

Welcome aboard, Wally. Here’s the moment Jeff Bezos asked Wally Funk to join our first human flight on July 20 as our honored guest. https://t.co/ESBJ7bxErK

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 1, 2021

Through a spokesperson, Blue Origin declined to arrange an interview with Funk on Thursday. Funk was the first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector and first female National Transportation Safety Board air safety investigator. And with the New Shepard flight later this month, she will blaze yet another trail, becoming the oldest person to fly into space. “No one has waited longer,” Bezos wrote in an Instagram caption. “It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally. We’re excited to have you fly with us on July 20th as our honored guest.” Isabella Grullón Paz c.2021 The New York Times Company