Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos picks female aerospace pioneer, 82, to join him on space trip
- Wally Funk is a former pilot who was denied astronaut wings decades ago because of her gender
- The company announced on Thursday that Funk will be aboard the July 20 launch, flying as an ‘honoured guest’
Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos has chosen an early female aerospace pioneer – an 82-year-old pilot denied astronaut wings decades ago because of her gender – to rocket into space with him in just three weeks.
The company announced on Thursday that Wally Funk will be aboard the July 20 launch from West Texas, flying in the capsule for the 10-minute hop as an “honoured guest”. She will join Bezos, his brother and the winner of a charity auction, as the first people to ride a New Shepard rocket, named for Mercury 7 astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
Funk is among the so-called Mercury 13 women who went through astronaut training in the 1960s, but never made it to space – or even Nasa’s astronaut corps – because they were female. Back then, all of the Nasa astronauts were military test pilots and male.
In an Instagram video posted by Bezos, Funk said she feels “fabulous” about being asked to launch.
“Nothing has ever got in my way,” she noted. “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.”
At age 82, Funk will become the oldest person to launch into space. She will beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998.
