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Higher, faster, longer. This motto kept Wally Funk going her whole life and ultimately led her to fulfill her lifelong dream of going to space.
The pioneer pilot always dreamed of becoming an astronaut and was refused the job in the 1960s because of her gender. All of that will change on Tuesday as she straps onto a Blue Origin capsule and flies into the cosmos.
Blue Origin billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, along with his brother Mark Bezos and Dutch student Oliver Daemen will complete the four-passenger crew of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on its very first crew launch.
The rocket is scheduled to take off from Texas in the United States at 8:00 a.m. local time (1:00 p.m. GMT). At 18, Daemen will be the youngest person to launch into space, and at 82, Funk will be the oldest.
Women in space
Funk’s obsession with planes and aviation began decades ago.
As a child, she built balsa planes and even had her first flying lesson at the age of nine.
As a teenager, she obtained her pilot’s license from Stephens College before moving on to Oklahoma State University, where she studied education and honed her skills.
In the college aviation club, called the “Flying Aggies”, she regularly outperformed the boys.
“I could do all the maneuvers as well as the boys, if not better,” Funk told Al Jazeera.
She then became a flight instructor. While working at a military base, she heard about an Air Force project to recruit women for the US space program.
Led by William Randolph Lovelace in the early 1960s, the Woman in Space program aimed to see if women were as capable of handling spaceflight as men. Pilot Jerrie Cobb, who was part of the program, named his fellow members First Lady Astronaut Trainees.
Wally Funk (second from left) and his colleagues from the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, also known as “Mercury 13”, gathered for a photo in 1995 as they witnessed the launch of a shuttle in Florida. From left to right: Gene Nora Jessen, Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Rutley, Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman [File: NASA via AP]Funk applied, and although she was only 22 years old (the required age was technically 25-40), she was accepted.
She passed every test they threw at her, including spending more than 10 hours in a sensory deprivation tank, surpassing the record set by Mercury astronaut John Glenn.
Although she passed hands down, Funk learned that she wouldn’t be an astronaut after all, as the women’s program was canceled. It didn’t slow Funk down at all.
“I’m not a let go,” Funk said. “Have things been canceled?” Wally continues. I am not a coward.
She wrote to NASA several times to become an astronaut, but at that time astronauts were mostly men and military pilots or engineers. Funk had studied education.
So she tried to go back to school to study engineering, but said she was struck off because she was female.
Funk decided to keep pushing the boundaries of what a woman could do in aviation.
“I took all the tests I could,” she says. “I even went to Russia and took their cosmonaut tests and beat all the boys.”
Failure is not an option
Despite Funk’s success, space was still out of reach. But stopping just isn’t in her vocabulary, so when a new era of commercial space flight began, she persevered.
She posted a bond for a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight a decade ago after billionaire founder Richard Branson announced he would one day take tourists to space. She didn’t know if she would live until the day it happened, but she still wanted to be part of the adventure.
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson poses with Wally Funk during a rally in 2012 in the commercial space company’s hangar at Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California in the United States [File: Reed Saxon/AP Photo]Then, in June, Funk got a call from another space billionaire, former Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. He invited her to make the maiden flight of his New Shepard rocket on July 20.
Tuesday’s flight will last around 10 minutes in total, and for four of those minutes, Funk will be able to enjoy unobstructed views of Earth and experience weightlessness.
The capsule will then land under a parachute in the Texas desert, cementing Funk in the history books as the oldest person to fly in space and knocking down astronaut John Glenn, who made the trip to the age 77.
The need for more diversity
Funk’s story of perseverance is simply inspiring. Her struggle to be included as a woman, however, is one that has plagued NASA (and the aerospace industry as a whole) since its inception.
According to a report from the career platform Zippia, only 12.5% of U.S. aerospace engineers are women, and that statistic hasn’t really changed much over the past decade.
Recently, the US space agency has made great strides in welcoming more women and people of all origins and ethnicities into its fold.
Four of its centers across the United States are currently headed by women – Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Glenn Research Center.
Wally Funk visited the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio in 2019 – one of the NASA centers now run by women [File: NASA via AP]NASA’s deputy administrator is also female, as is the head of human spaceflight.
As part of the agency’s Artemis lunar program, NASA has pledged to send the first woman and the first person of color to the moon over the next few years. These astronauts will attach themselves to an Orion spacecraft built by the aerospace company Lockheed Martin, one of NASA’s main contractors.
Lockheed Martin recently opened a new production facility in Florida to help streamline the process and bring more aerospace jobs to the region. The company said more than 20 percent of its executives are women.
Kelly DeFazio, Orion’s production manager for Lockheed Martin, said the company will create at least 40 jobs in Florida and she hopes many of them go to women.
“My dad was part of the Apollo program so it’s really exciting to see the area develop again and we [as Lockheed Martin] want to be part of it, ”DeFazio told Al Jazeera.
In an office not too far away, Suba Iyer works on NASA’s next massive rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). As an Indo-American scientist, she saw with her own eyes the need for more diversity.
“I’m a mechanical engineer and you don’t see a lot of women in my field even today,” Iyer told Al Jazeera.
But after working in the aerospace industry for nearly 30 years on various programs, including the space shuttle and now SLS, Iyer said she was finally seeing things change.
“It’s amazing to be a part of this program,” she said.
“I have teenagers, so they just saw what’s going on and what I’m a part of, and it makes a difference,” Iyer added. “My children are so proud of me. “
One of the benefits of the burgeoning commercial space sector is that by working with more companies, NASA and others are learning new ways of thinking and innovating, and joining more diverse teams. .
NASA and the National Science Foundation are also collaborating on an initiative to bring people into the field from communities currently under-represented in careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
And as long as the pressure to include a more diverse workforce continues, the United States looks poised to remain a world leader in space.
