Copernical Team
Seasoned US pilot Wally Funk to fulfill space dream 60 years on
Sixty years after joining a private program with the hope of one day becoming an astronaut, US pilot Wally Funk will finally see her dream come true at age 82.
On Thursday, Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos invited her to join him on his spaceflight company Blue Origin's July 20 launch.
The flight will not just make her the oldest person ever to travel in space, but also a walking, breathing symbol of the rewards of audacity and perseverance.
"I like to do things that nobody's ever done," she said in a video posted on Instagram by Bezos.
Mercury 13
Funk grew up in the western United States in Taos, New Mexico. As a child she was passionate about aviation and took her first flying lesson at age nine. In high school, she was barred from taking mechanics, a subject reserved for boys.
Such rules did not prevent her from obtaining a pilot's license and graduating from Oklahoma State University, known for its aviation program. By now she has logged 19,600 hours of flight time.
At the very beginning of the 1960s she joined a privately-funded, innovative flight program called Mercury 13—which put women through the same training and tests as the male astronauts undergoing the official NASA program.
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Barrier-breaking woman aviator Wally Funk, 82, will join Jeff Bezos this month on the first crewed spaceflight for the billionaire's company Blue Origin, the firm announced Thursday.
The trip is 60 years overdue for Funk, who was one of the Mercury 13 - the first women trained to fly to space from 1960-1961, but excluded because of their gender.
On July 20, she will become the oldest pe Rogue Space and Orbital Assembly want to lease 2 Laura Orbot spacecraft
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