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As an aviator, Wally Funk, who has died aged 87, was a trailblazing pioneer for women, breaking barriers for eight decades of a remarkable career. “Aviation has been my whole life; I eat and breathe it,” she said in her 2020 memoir, Higher, Faster, Longer (written with Loretta Hall).
She earned her pilot’s licence as a teenager, at 20 was the US military’s first female flight instructor, in 1971 became the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) first female flight inspector, and three years later was the first woman instructor for the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB). But hanging over these accomplishments was her unfulfilled dream of becoming an astronaut.
In 1960 she discovered that the young pilot Jerrie Cobb had been tested for spaceflight, and despite being below the age requirement, she joined the programme that became the so-called Mercury 13, who underwent the same training and testing as the seven American men chosen as Mercury astronauts.
Having tested top of the group, including spending 10 hours 35 minutes in an isolation tank, and having three feet of rubber tubing shoved down her throat, Funk requested four times to be picked for space flight. But Nasa was not prepared to send a woman into space; they would accept only USAF pilots, who of course were all male.
It did not matter that, in 1963, the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, completing a solo, three-day, 48-orbit journey in Vostok 6. Nor that Funk had out-tested the Mercury astronaut (and future senator) John Glenn, who told Congress in 1962, “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
Nasa eventually relented, but too late for Funk, as Sally Ride became America’s first female in space in 1983, though not until 1999 did Eileen Collins become the first pilot/commander of the space shuttle Columbia.
Following her rejection by Nasa, Funk had trained in Russia at the Yuri Gagarin Centre in Star City near Moscow; in 2000 she returned there to do zero gravity weightless training in a specially equipped Ilyushin 76 cargo plane.
Two decades later, in 2021, Wally was invited to join Jeff Bezos and his brother on a sub-orbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, making her, at 82, the oldest person to fly into space. They took with them a helmet and goggles worn by the famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Although the Star Trek actor William Shatner, at 90, broke her age record (since broken again by the former pilot Ed Dwight), Funk remains the oldest woman in space. “I’ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there,” she said after the flight, asking when she could go again. Blue Origin said on her death that they “were humbled to be part of her journey”.
Born Mary Wallace Funk in Las Vegas, New Mexico, she grew up in the town of Taos, where her father, Losier, and mother, Virginia (nee Shy) ran a five and dime store catering to the tourist trade. She began flying, she recalled, at the age of five, jumping from their barn onto a bale of hay wearing a Superman cape. Much of her childhood was spent among the Pueblo people around Taos, where she learned to love the outdoors.
Wally quit high school at 16 when she was not allowed to take classes in mechanical drawing instead of home economics. She enrolled at the private, all-women Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, a junior college that offered an aviation programme.
She moved on to Oklahoma State University, competing for their aviation team, the Flying Aggies, in collegiate competitions. After earning her bachelor of science degree, she became, aged 20, a civilian flight instructor at the Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma. Although she had her commercial pilot’s licence, no major airline would hire female pilots, so she became an instructor and charter pilot at Hawthorne airport in California.
Besides her work for the FAA and NTSB, Funk trained more than 800 pilots at her flight school in Taos. She was a pilot for Sierra Pacific Airlines, a regional operation based in Tucson, Arizona. As both pilot and navigator she flew in many competitions, including the transcontinental Powder Puff Derby. She became a spokesperson and inspirational speaker, especially for women’s equality in the workplace.
“Nothing has ever gotten in my way,” she said. “They said ‘well you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’ I said ‘guess what, doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it.’”
Funk was elected to the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1995, and joined the Wall of Honor at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2017. Following her 2021 space flight, she received astronaut wings, and a young person’s book based on her memoir was published in 2025.
