When aviation pioneer Wally Funk was headed to Hopkinsville in 2008 to give a speech to a group of local students, she said she wanted to encourage them “to never give up” on their dreams.
That wasn’t just talk.
Funk, who dreamed most of her life of going into space as an astronaut, is about to realize her goal at the age of 82. Billionaire Jeff Bezos has chosen Funk to join him and two others — his brother, Mark Bezos, and the winner of an auction — on Blue Origin’s first flight into space with a crew on July 20.
Aboard the New Shepard, a six-passenger spacecraft that has already flown more than a dozen test missions without a crew, Funk will become the oldest person ever to go into space. She’ll break the record set by John Glenn, who was 77 and a member of the U.S. Senate when he flew on the space shuttle Discovery in 1998.
“I like to do things that nobody has ever done,” Funk said in a video posted to social media after Bezos announced on Thursday that he was taking her on the New Shepard.
Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, also owns Blue Origin, the space exploration company that aims to eventually take tourists into space.
The July 20 flight will last approximately 11 minutes, taking the four passengers to the edge of space roughly 62 miles above the Earth’s surface. They will experience weightlessness for a few minutes before the capsule descends back to Earth under parachutes.
Funk, who was born in 1939, began flying before her 20th birthday. In 1961, she volunteered for a Women in Space program to train privately with a team of medical experts from NASA’s astronaut program. The women went through the same training as men who were in the Mercury 7 program. Funk and 12 other women completed the training, which was called Mercury 13, but their program was canceled before any of the women could officially join NASA.
Her connection to Hopkinsville came through the Academic All-Stars, a project launched by the Kentucky New Era in 2003 to recognize high-achieving students. Then-publisher Taylor Hayes invited Funk to be the keynote speaker for the program’s awards ceremony in 2008 at the Hopkinsville Community College.
In an interview before the awards ceremony, Funk emphasized persistence and goal-setting in life, saying, “Everybody has a choice, so make good choices.”
Funk was a U.S. Air Force pilot and broke a number gender barriers in aviation. She was the Federal Aviation Administration’s first female inspector and the first female air safety investigator for the Transportation Safety Board. She has more than 19,000 flight hours as a pilot and has been an instructor to 3,000 students, according to her website.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
