Funk, Wally (1939-…), is a pioneering woman aviator. Funk has had a distinguished career as a pilot, logging thousands of miles or kilometers in the air and teaching thousands of other pilots. In the 1960’s, Funk was part of an early program to test women’s physical capabilities for spaceflight.
Mary Wallace Funk was born Feb. 1, 1939, in Las Vegas, New Mexico , near Santa Fe. She began her first flying lessons at the age of nine. In high school, Funk found the course options available to women limited, so she left high school and enrolled in Stephens College, an all-girls school in Columbia, Missouri. There, she graduated first in her flying class and earned her pilot’s license in 1958. Funk earned her Bachelor of Science degree in secondary education from Oklahoma State University . There, she joined the school aviation team, the Flying Aggies. In 1960, at the age of 21, she was named a flight instructor at Fort Sill , in Oklahoma, becoming the first woman flight instructor at a U.S. military base.
In 1961, when Funk was 22 years old, she volunteered for the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLAT’s) program, which aimed to investigate whether women pilots were physically suited for space missions. The privately funded program was managed by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) physician but was not an official agency initiative. The women in the FLAT’s program underwent the strenuous physical and psychological fitness tests that NASA administered to astronaut candidates. The tests included having the volunteers exercise to the point of exhaustion, and injecting ice water into their ears. In each situation, doctors measured how well the women’s bodies withstood the extreme conditions. Funk and the other women who passed the screening performed well, sometimes outperforming the men of the Mercury 7, the first seven astronauts chosen as part of the U.S. Mercury program. The 13 women who passed the tests became known as the Mercury 13. In 1962, the FLAT’s program was canceled when testing could not progress without NASA authorization.
After the FLAT’s program ended, Funk continued her career as a pilot and flight instructor. She became the first woman inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1971. In 1974, she became the first woman air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board , investigating plane crashes.
NASA began accepting women as astronauts in 1978, and Funk applied four times to the agency for astronaut training. She was denied, despite her experience, because she did not have an engineering degree. Undeterred, Funk pursued opportunities for private space travel. In 2010, she purchased a ticket from the space tourism company Virgin Galactic for $200,000, for a seat on a future suborbital spaceflight.
On July 20, 2021, Funk accompanied the American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos to the boundary of space in a brief suborbital flight on the spacecraft New Shepard, built by Bezos’s company Blue Origin. At age 82, Funk was at that time the oldest person to travel to space. Funk has authored a memoir, Higher, Faster, Stronger: My Life in Aviation and My Quest for Spaceflight (2020, with Loretta Hall).
