Wally Funk, who was among the most accomplished female pilots of her time and who, at 82, became the oldest person to fly in space, achieving a goal she had set some 60 years earlier, died Wednesday at her home in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth. She was 87.
Her death was confirmed by Mona Quintanilla, a spokesperson for the city of Grapevine.
“Aviation has been my whole life,” Ms. Funk wrote in her 2020 memoir. “I eat it, and I breathe it.”
In the early 1960s, she was among a group of 25 women, later reduced to 13, who were put through rigorous tests at the dawn of the Space Age to determine how women might fare in space. Ms. Funk was the only aviator in the group — which became known as the Mercury 13 — to pass all the tests.
But seven men, known as the Mercury Seven and tested separately, were selected by NASA to be its first astronauts, because the space agency wasn’t prepared to risk sending women into space. The Mercury Seven included Alan Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when he completed a suborbital flight in May 1961, and John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.
Ms. Funk made several unsuccessful attempts to be accepted by NASA for its astronaut corps, which didn’t admit women until 1978, when she was 39. The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, a mission specialist on a shuttle flight in 1983. (The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian who flew a solo mission in 1963.)
But Ms. Funk continued to fly, taught aviation privately, and oversaw numerous investigations into air crashes, initially as the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and later for the National Transportation Safety Board.
She owned a flying school in Taos, N.M.; piloted a twin-engine passenger plane for Sierra Pacific Airlines, based in Tucson, Ariz.; and competed in the women’s transcontinental air races known as the Powder Puff Derby. In her memoir, Higher Faster Longer, written with Loretta Hall, Ms. Funk said she had logged more than 19,000 hours of flying.
She was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1995, and her name was inscribed on the Wall of Honor at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2017.
Ms. Funk, who never flew for NASA, set her age record for space travel in July 2021, when she took part in a trip that lasted 10 minutes and 19 seconds, aboard New Shepard, a rocket built by Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos. Bezos was a passenger on the flight, along with his brother, Mark, and a teenage physics student.
The rocket rose above the 62-mile threshold generally regarded as the beginning of space before returning to Earth.
“We went right on up, and I saw darkness,” Ms. Funk said at a celebratory news conference. “I was going to see the world, but we weren’t quite high enough. I loved every minute of it. I just wish it had been longer.”
That October, William Shatner of Star Trek fame, then 90, set a record for the oldest person to fly in space. In 2024, Ed Dwight, who was also 90 but a few months older than Shatner had been, became the current record-holder.
Mary Wallace Funk (she preferred Wally) was born in Las Vegas on Feb. 1, 1939, to Losier and Virginia Shy Funk. She grew up in Taos, where her father opened a five-and-dime store selling modestly priced items.
“I got my first try at flying, just pure flying, by flying my Superman cape off my daddy’s barn when I was about 5 years old,” she recalled in a 1999 oral history interview with NASA.
She landed in a pile of hay, but her fascination with flying was undiminished. “I was allowed to make airplanes out of blocks of balsa wood and hang them from my ceiling,” she said in the interview.
“I grew up in an area where you had free spirit,” she added. “I was brought up by the Indians of a Taos pueblo, and they taught me how to fish and hunt and camp at a very early age and survive the wilderness. So I had all that going for myself, where a youngster today is in a city, in an apartment, and that’s all they know. They don’t know ocean and skiing and snow and air as I was able to know it.”
Ms. Funk obtained a pilot’s license while attending Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., a two-year women’s school, and then enrolled at Oklahoma State University, which had a prominent flight school.
She had a rating for piloting a glider and a seaplane by the time she was 19. Later, she recalled that there were “never any eyes raised or eyebrows raised about ‘What’s that girl doing?’”
After graduating from Oklahoma State, she became a flight instructor at the Fort Sill, Okla., Army base before beginning her long road to spaceflight.
Ms. Funk, who never married, has no immediate survivors.
Before Funk’s Blue Origin flight in 2021, Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist and director of science strategy at Planet Labs, told the New York Times: “Seeing her finally get to go into space decades after proving that she was not only capable, but perhaps more capable than the men she was essentially up against during the Mercury program is so incredible.”
When the flight was over, Ms. Funk said she had one overriding desire: “I want to go again, fast.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
