She has been waiting for this moment for decades: the pioneer Wally Funk will fly into space with Jeff Bezos – and become the oldest female astronaut in the world.
Washington – On July 20, 2021, exactly 52 years after the historic first moon landing of the USA, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos plans to board his space capsule for the first time and fly into space with the “New Shepard” rocket of his company Blue Origin. His brother Mark will be there, and a person not yet known by name has paid $ 28 million for a place on board the space capsule. Now it is also known who should also fly into space: Wally Funk.
Funk has had the plan to become an astronaut for decades – at the age of 82 it should now come true for her. On board the “New Shepard” she will be Jeff Bezos’ guest of honor, announced Blue Origin by email. In the 1960s, Wally Funk was part of the “Mercury 13”, a group of female pilots who passed medical tests originally designed for the male astronauts in NASA’s “Mercury” program.
Jeff Bezos takes oldest female astronaut on board the “New Shepard” rocket
It was not a NASA program, but the US space agency was to be convinced to include female astronauts in its planning. Wally Funk was the youngest participant in the program and did the best. When NASA accepted women in space travel in the late 1970s, Funk applied three times – but was turned down because she neither had an engineering degree nor was a test pilot. It would be several years before Sally Ride, the first American woman, actually flew into space in 1983.
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Even if space travel never worked, Wally Funk stayed with flying: The pilot completed 19,600 hours of flight time and, according to her own statements, taught more than 3,000 people to fly. Funk later became the first woman to work as an inspector for the U.S. FAA and the National Transportation Safety and Security Agency (NTSB). “I’ve always flown,” says Funk in a video that Bezos shared on Instagram. “I never thought that I would be allowed to fly into space,” she recalls.
Private space travel: Wally Funk has been waiting to become an astronaut for decades
When Bezos tells her that she can get on board the “New Shepard” with him, Funk hugs him enthusiastically and speechlessly. When she said, “You’re going to be an astronaut!” All she can think of is: “Oh, finally!” She’ll enjoy every second of it, says Funk. After four minutes in weightlessness and landing in the desert, she will get out of the space capsule and say “Honey, that was the best thing that has ever happened to me!”
It is not yet known who besides Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark and Wally Funk will be on board the first astronautical flight of Blue Origin’s “New Shepard”. However, the name of the person who paid $ 28 million for the flight is slated to be revealed before it even takes off. With the space capsule, the four should ascend to a height of just over 100 kilometers. This so-called Kármán line is considered the internationally recognized boundary to space.
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