Wally Funk, Mercury 13 trailblazer became oldest person in space

Wally Funk, the Mercury 13 pilot who matched the same screening standards as NASA’s early male astronaut candidates and still spent decades outside the astronaut corps, died at 87 in Grapevine, Texas. Her life traced a line from exclusion in 1961 to a Blue Origin flight in 2021 that made her the oldest person to fly in space, a rare career that forced American space history to reckon with who was kept out of the story.

The women known as the Mercury 13, or First Lady Astronaut Trainees, were privately organized and underwent physiological and psychological screening tests similar to those used for the Mercury astronauts. NASA says the group was never an official NASA program, even though the women pressed against the same barriers as the men whose names became household history. The roster included Jerrie Cobb, Gene Nora Jessen, Eileen Collins, Sarah Rutley, Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman, but the official astronaut pipeline remained closed to them.

Funk’s own path into aviation began early. She took her first flying lesson at 9, recovered from a skiing accident at 16 by returning to aviation, earned her pilot’s license at 17 and, as NASA’s history pages note, became the youngest graduate of the Woman in Space Program, when she was a 23-year-old flight instructor. Blue Origin also identified her as the first female FAA inspector and the first female NTSB air safety investigator, jobs that put her in positions women had rarely held in federal aviation oversight.

Her final public triumph arrived on July 20, 2021, when Blue Origin’s first human flight carried Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Oliver Daemen and Funk past the Kármán line. Blue Origin said Funk was 82 years and 169 days old when she crossed into space, a mark that held her as the oldest person to fly there; NASA later honored her in 2022 with the Michael Collins Trophy for lifetime achievement. The arc of her life ran alongside the Mercury program, which lasted from 1961 to 1963, after Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, 1961, and Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963.