Wally Funk
What inspired Wally Funk to pursue aviation?
What obstacles did Wally Funk face in becoming an astronaut?
What achievements did Wally Funk accomplish in aviation?
How did Wally Funk finally travel to space?
By the time she was seven years old, Wally Funk was making airplanes out of balsa wood; she had her first flying lesson when she was nine, and when she was in her teens she earned her pilot’s license. What she really wanted to do was be an astronaut, but because of NASA policies that discriminated against women, she had to wait six decades to fulfill that dream. In 2021, at the age of 82, Funk became the oldest woman to go to space.
Early life
- Birth date and place: February 1, 1939; Las Vegas, New Mexico, U.S.
- Death date and place: July 8, 2026; Grapevine, Texas.
- About her name: Wally, which she has been called for most of her life, is short for Mary Wallace.
- Education: Stephens College, Associate of Arts degree; Oklahoma State University, Bachelor of Science in secondary education as well as flight training certification
- Best known for: Being the oldest woman to go to space
- Family: Never married. “I’m married to airplanes,” she told The Guardian in 2002.
- Quotation: “I was 21 years old, and I thought, ‘Wally, you’re still going into space, just not right now.’ ”—on her reaction to the cancellation of the Women in Space program
Mary Wallace Funk was born in New Mexico to Lozier and Virginia Shy Funk, who owned and operated a chain of five-and-dime stores that catered to the area’s artists. As a child she learned how to hunt, fish, camp, ski, and ride a horse. At 14 the National Rifle Association awarded Funk the Distinguished Rifleman’s Award and passed along her shooting scores to Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who rewarded her with a personal letter. At the same time, she represented the southwestern United States as a skier in nationwide competition.
It was a serious skiing accident at age 16, shortly after she had enrolled at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, that led her to take up flying again. With two of her vertebrae crushed, doctors were skeptical that she would ever walk again, but Funk was determined to recover—and while doing so, took up flying classes again as a distraction. By 17 she had her pilot’s license, and when Funk graduated from Stephens in 1958 with an Associate of Arts degree, she was rated first in her class of 24 fliers.
Taking flight
Funk left New Mexico for Oklahoma State University, which at the time ran the most acclaimed flight school in the U.S. For the next two years she logged thousands of hours in flying time, piloting a variety of planes. By the time she graduated in 1960, she had not only earned a bachelor’s degree in secondary education but also commercial, single-engine land, multi-engine land, single-engine sea, instrument, flight instructor’s, and ground instructor’s ratings. She had also served as an officer of the famous “Flying Aggies,” a group of student aviators who flew at international collegiate air meets. At those meets Funk won the Outstanding Female Pilot Award, the Flying Aggie Top Pilot Award, and the Alfred Alder Memorial Trophy (twice). “As a Flying Aggie, I could do all the maneuvers as well as the boys, if not better,” she told The Guardian in 2019.
At age 20, Funk began her career at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, working as a civilian flight instructor for officers of the U.S. Army. She trained men to be military pilots while not being allowed to become one herself. Shortly after she began teaching, however, Funk read an article titled “Damp Prelude to Space” in Life magazine. It told the story of how a woman named Jerrie Cobb endured an isolation tank in preparation for a space mission. Funk immediately wrote to the supervisor of the experiment, asking how she could become an astronaut herself. Funk was put in touch with William Lovelace, who agreed to accept her into the program despite her comparative youth.
Entering the space program
Funk joined the Women in Space Program with about two dozen other FLATs (First Lady Astronaut Trainees). Together they took the same tests designed by Lovelace for the Mercury 7 pilots, to see if women were good candidates to travel into space. Thirteen of the participants passed, Funk included, and the graduates became known as the “Mercury 13.” They did not become known as astronauts, however; the government shut down the Women in Space Program shortly thereafter, dashing their hopes.
Funk applied to NASA twice in 1962 for the Gemini missions and twice more after that. Each time, she was rejected for lacking an engineering degree and time flying a jet. Funk could have obtained the former, but the latter was impossible for a woman at the time.
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Making flight history
Undeterred, Funk continued in aviation and continued to make history. In 1971 she became the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) first female flight inspector, and, in 1973, its first female SWAP (Systems Worthiness Analysis Program) specialist. In 1974 she joined the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as its first woman air safety investigator, during which time she made the discovery that small-plane crash victims tend to have their clothes ripped off on impact. In the meantime she also participated in air races, in which she won multiple awards.
In 1985, Funk briefly left her position as an NTSB investigator to serve as an FAA safety counselor, then returned to the private sector, where she was an in-demand pilot, speaker, and judge. She would eventually log more than 19,600 hours of flight time and guide over 3,000 students to their pilot licenses or an advanced rating. On March 18, 1995, she was inducted into the Aviation Women’s Hall of Fame in St. Louis, Missouri.
For all that, Funk retained a strong interest in space. In 1988 she met the first woman to go to space, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, as a member of an international delegation to Russia. In 2000, she returned to Russia to fly an Ilyshin-76 airplane in parabolic arcs, allowing her to enter a zero-G weightless state. She described the feeling as “the most thrilling experience I have ever had.”
In space, at last
Still she pursued proper space travel. In 2010 Funk bought a ticket on Virgin Galactic for $200,000, but the company temporarily suspended operations after an accident in 2014. In 2020 she published an autobiography (written with Loretta Hall) that made clear her continued yearning to escape Earth’s atmosphere, Higher Faster Longer: My Life in Aviation and My Quest for Space Flight.
Finally, she received her chance: an invitation from billionaire Jeff Bezos to be one of the first four passengers served by Blue Origin, his new space tourism company. Alongside Bezos, his brother Mark, and eighteen-year-old Oliver Daemen, Funk was launched into space aboard a spaceship named New Shepard on July 20, 2021. She was 82, making her the oldest person to go to space at the time (a record surpassed later that year by William Shatner, who was 90). What was Funk’s reaction to finally going into space?
I want to go again—fast.
