Wally Funk: Aviation Pioneer and Spaceflight Trailblazer
Wally Funk, a pioneering American aviator who became the oldest woman to fly into space at age 82 in 2021, has died aged 87. Over an extraordinary eight-decade career, she broke numerous barriers for women in aviation. Reflecting on her lifelong passion, Funk stated in her 2020 memoir Higher, Faster, Longer (co-written with Loretta Hall),
"Aviation has been my whole life; I eat and breathe it."
She earned her pilot’s license as a teenager and, by age 20, was the US military’s first female flight instructor. In 1971, she became the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) first female flight inspector, and three years later, the first woman instructor for the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB). Despite these groundbreaking achievements, her aspiration to become an astronaut remained unfulfilled for many years.
In 1960, Funk learned that fellow young pilot Jerrie Cobb had been tested for spaceflight. Although she was below the age requirement, Funk joined the program that became known as the "Mercury 13," a group of women who underwent the same rigorous training and testing as the seven American men selected as Mercury astronauts.
Funk excelled in the program, ranking at the top of the group. Her tests included spending 10 hours and 35 minutes in an isolation tank and enduring the insertion of three feet of rubber tubing down her throat. Despite requesting to be selected for spaceflight four times, NASA was unwilling to send a woman into space at that time, limiting candidates to USAF pilots, all of whom were male.
This exclusion persisted even though, in 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, completing a solo three-day, 48-orbit mission aboard Vostok 6. Funk had also outperformed Mercury astronaut John Glenn during testing. Glenn had testified before Congress in 1962, stating,
"The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order."
NASA eventually allowed women in space, but too late for Funk. Sally Ride became America’s first female astronaut in 1983, and Eileen Collins became the first pilot and commander of the space shuttle Columbia in 1999.
After NASA’s rejection, Funk trained in Russia at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City near Moscow. In 2000, she returned there to undergo zero-gravity weightless training aboard a specially equipped Ilyushin 76 cargo plane.
Two decades later, in 2021, Wally Funk flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, becoming, at 82, the oldest person to travel into space. She carried with her a helmet and goggles once worn by the famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Although Star Trek actor William Shatner briefly held the record for oldest person in space, it was later surpassed by former pilot John Glenn. Funk remains the oldest woman to have flown in space. After the flight, she remarked,
"I’ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there,"
and asked when she could go again. Blue Origin stated upon her passing that they "were humbled to be part of her journey."
Early Life and Education
Born Mary Wallace Funk in Las Vegas, Texas, she was raised in Taos, New Mexico, where her parents, Losier and Virginia (née Shy), operated a five and dime store serving tourists. She recalled beginning to fly at the age of five by jumping from their barn onto a bale of hay while wearing a Superman cape. Much of her childhood was spent among the Pueblo people near Taos, fostering a deep appreciation for the outdoors.
At 16, Funk left high school after being denied the opportunity to take mechanical drawing classes instead of home economics. She enrolled at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, a private all-women’s junior college offering an aviation program.
She later attended Oklahoma State University, where she competed on the aviation team known as the Flying Aggies in collegiate competitions. After earning her Bachelor of Science degree, she became a civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma at age 20. Despite holding a commercial pilot’s license, major airlines would not hire female pilots at the time, so she worked as an instructor and charter pilot at Hawthorne Airport in California.
Career and Legacy
Beyond her FAA and NTSB roles, Funk trained over 800 pilots at her flight school in Taos. She also flew as a pilot for Sierra Pacific Airlines, a regional carrier based in Tucson, Arizona. As both pilot and navigator, she participated in numerous competitions, including the transcontinental Powder Puff Derby. She became a prominent spokesperson and inspirational speaker advocating for women’s equality in the workplace.
Reflecting on the obstacles she faced, Funk said,
"Nothing has ever gotten in my way. 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.’"
Her contributions were recognized with her election to the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1995. In 2017, she was inducted into the Wall of Honor at the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Washington. Following her 2021 spaceflight, she was awarded astronaut wings. A young reader’s book based on her memoir was published in 2025, further cementing her legacy.
