More Sky Ahead
Wally Funk waited 60 years for an 11-minute flight.
Born Mary Wallace Funk in 1939 and raised in New Mexico, she was fascinated by airplanes. She entered Stephens College in Missouri at 16, joined its women’s flying club, and earned her pilot’s license the following year. Flying soon became more than an interest; it became the organizing purpose of her life.
By 1961, Funk had accumulated enough experience to volunteer for an experimental program studying whether women could withstand the physical and psychological demands of spaceflight. The privately funded project was led by Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II, who had helped develop medical testing for NASA’s original Mercury astronauts. Although NASA did not sponsor the women’s program, its participants underwent many of the same examinations as the Mercury 7.
Thirteen women successfully completed the testing and later became known as the Mercury 13. At age 21,Funk was the youngest.
One of the most demanding experiments placed her in a dark, soundproof sensory-deprivation tank. Researchers expected isolation to become intolerable after several hours, but Funk remained inside for 10 hours and 35 minutes, setting a record and emerging only after the medical staff ended the test. She ranked third among the women overall and outperformed many of the male astronauts on individual measures.
The results proved that women could meet the demands of astronaut testing. But they did not lead to an invitation to space.
The program ended before the women could complete its final phase, and NASA’s astronaut requirements effectively excluded them. Funk contacted the agency repeatedly, but her applications went nowhere. NASA did not select its first female astronauts until 1978, and Sally Ride became the first American woman in space five years later. Regardless, Funk kept flying.
When commercial airlines declined to hire her, she built a career elsewhere in aviation. She became the first female civilian flight instructor at a U.S. military base, the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration, and the first female air-safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. Over the course of her career, she logged more than 19,000 hours in the air and taught more than 3,000 people to fly.
Her confidence was as unmistakable as her résumé: “Everything the FAA has, I’ve got the license for,” she once joked. “And I can outrun you.” Yet the dream of space remained.
On July 20, 2021, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos invited Funk to join the first crewed flight of the company’s New Shepard spacecraft. At age 82, strapped into a capsule above the Texas desert, the youngest member of the Mercury 13 finally left Earth.
The flight lasted approximately 11 minutes. The capsule crossed the boundary of space, giving its passengers several minutes of weightlessness before parachuting back to the desert. Funk became the oldest person ever to travel into space at the time and remains the oldest woman to have done so. She was also the only member of the Mercury 13 ever to reach space.
Wally Funk died on July 8, 2026, in Grapevine, Texas, at the age of 87. Her life stretched from the propeller planes of her childhood to the opening years of commercial spaceflight. Along the way, she became an instructor, inspector, investigator, record setter -- and, at last, an astronaut.
Her story is more than a lesson about persistence. It reminds us that a closed door does not always mean the journey is over. The path often takes a form we could never have predicted, and sometimes its fulfillment arrives on a timetable far longer than we would have chosen.
Faith invites us to keep offering our lives to God during those long years between hope and fulfillment. The destination may change and the route may surprise us, but no faithful season is wasted. Even after 60 years, there may still be more sky ahead.