On July 20, Wally Funk will realize the dream of a lifetime: to go into space.
She will be alongside the founder of Amazon, the American Jeff Bezos, for the first manned flight of his company Blue Origin.
By boarding the New Shepard space capsule at 82, Wally Funk will become the oldest person to travel in space.
A strong symbol for this dynamic and persevering personality who was told sixty years ago:
space is not for women
.
"I would like to do things that no one else has done"
Mary Wally Funk, born February 1, 1939 in Las Vegas, grew up in Taos, New Mexico.
Passionate about aviation, she took her first flight course at the age of 9.
In high school, she already wanted to be a pilot but was forbidden to take mechanics lessons, reserved for boys.
That didn't stop her from getting her pilot's license and graduating from the famed Oklahoma State University aviation program.
Her leitmotif
: “I would like to do things that no one else has done,” she
explains.
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Mercury 13, a test program to become a woman astronaut
As the United States prepares to send the first American into space, Wally Funk is a candidate for the Mercury program.
Men are then selected by NASA for tests, but no women.
Couldn't women withstand the harshness of these tests?
Doctor William Randolph Lovelace, who participated in their creations, wants to know if they are capable of it.
In the early sixties, the doctor then decided to have these tests carried out on women in his private clinic.
Result: Thirteen women succeed, including the youngest of them, Wally Funk.
Wally Funk (2nd from left) during the Mercury 13 program in the 1960s. Nasa / Wikimedia Commons NASA / Wikimedia Commons
Nicknamed Mercury 13, the test program consisted of tests each more trying than the next: water injected into the ears to cause a feeling of dizziness, rubber tubes to ingest. Interviewed in 1999, Wally Funk recounted finding himself locked in a tank filled with water and isolated from all sound and light.
“I was on my back, floating in this water, without being able to use my five senses […] I just had to lie there”.
she says.
She broke the record by staying there for 10 hours and 35 minutes.
"They told me that I had done the job better and faster than any of the men,"
she recalled Thursday, July 1 in a video posted online by the company Blue Origin.
Despite very good results, the Mercury 13 program is stopped: NASA does not want it.
It was not until 1983 that the first American flew into space.
VIDEO - Wally Funk, 82, talks about his journey which has always led him to dream of space - Source: Company Blue Origin
First female pilot inspector and investigator in a US agency
Determined, Wally Funk will apply for NASA four times to become an astronaut.
Each time, it will be a refusal.
In question ?
The fact that she did not have an engineering degree, nor did a flight program on a military fighter plane, a program impossible for a woman to follow at that time.
This refusal does not prevent her from pursuing her ambitions: she becomes the first female inspector of the American aviation agency, the FAA.
Then the first female investigator of the American agency in particular in charge of aeronautical disasters (NTSB).
She will treat more than 450 accidents until her retirement in 1984.
In total, she will have learned to fly to 3,000 people and will have completed 19,6000 hours of flight. Today she lives in Texas and despite her gray hair, she never gave up on going to space. Asked in 1999 about her greatest achievement, her goal remains the same at age 60: if "I can get into space, that will be it".
