![]() The four passengers experienced about four minutes of weightlessness. “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.The entire journey lasted only about 10 minutes, traveling about 62 miles above sea level at three times the speed of sound, or 2,300 miles per hour. ![]() “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,” he said. Shortly after he made that first historic journey, he testified before Congress about the wisdom of opening up the space program to women, and he did not cover himself in glory. She’ll break the record set by John Glenn who, in 1998, made his second trip to space-36 years after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth-at age 77. The fact that Funk is earning those wings as the oldest person to fly in space may be a smaller part of her larger story, but it comes with a certain circularity. “We’re excited to celebrate this moment with her and thrilled she’ll finally get to earn her astronaut wings.” After decades of waiting, it’s time-she finally gets to go,” says Linda Mills, Blue Origin’s vice president of communications. “This is Wally’s life ambition and she deserves it. But if Branson jumped the flight queue, Bezos jumped the Funk queue, inviting her last month to fly on his ship-immediately and for free. And yet she didn’t give up on the dream, deciding her best bet to make it to space was as a paying passenger: in 2010 she put a deposit down to fly aboard Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft-in the event it ever flew.īranson did fly, on July 11, beating fellow billionaire Bezos to space by nine days (presuming everything goes as planned for Blue Origin next week). ![]() In 1979, when NASA first announced it was accepting female astronaut candidates, she applied for the job-four times, in fact-never making the cut, partly because of her age she was 40 by the time NASA began accepting female applicants. Still, space beckoned-and still Funk persisted. She estimates she trained more than 3,000 eventual pilots, and she has accumulated 19,600 hours of flight time herself-or the equivalent of 2.2 years at the stick. Instead she continued training other people to fly and ultimately assuming her positions with the FAA and the NTSB. Funk applied to become a commercial airline pilot and was again passed over, almost certainly because of her gender. The program folded after that and the women, who became popularly known as the Mercury 13, watched from the ground as the men of NASA flew and flew and flew. Running parallel to NASA’s Mercury program-which was then training the seven men who very much were going to go to space-it was designed to put a similar corps of women through exactly the same physical and mental tests being administered to the male astronauts to see how they fared.Īs it happened, they fared just fine, with 19 women enrolling and 13 graduating-Funk at the top of the class-proving that women could pass the same rigorous tests the men could. Privately funded by William Lovelace, a physician and flight surgeon in the Army Medical Corps Reserve, Women in Space was a sort of proof-of-concept idea. In 1961, Funk, then 21 and already a professional aviation instructor, joined what was formally known as the “Women in Space” program-an aspirational project that in fact had not a lick of a chance of ever sending so much as a single woman to so much as a single square foot of space.
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