By akademiotoelektronik, 16/11/2022

Blue Origin: four things to know about Wally Funk, the octogenarian pilot whose dream of space will be realized by Jeff Bezos

The sky is the limit. All her life, Mary Wallace Funk, aka Wally Funk, looked to the stars. After six decades of trying to become an astronaut, this pilot must see her dream come true, Tuesday July 20, thanks to Jeff Bezos, who chose her to board the New Shepard rocket of his space company, Blue Origin. It will take off from Launch Site One, Blue Origin's launch base, in West Texas.

At 82, the pilot will become the oldest person to travel in space. Franceinfo presents four facets of the one who "likes to do things that no one else has done".

1 She believed in it from an early age

Wally Funk grew up in Taos, a small town in New Mexico (United States). At 5, "she jumped from the barn with a Superman cape, expecting to fly too. Fortunately, there was a haystack to cushion her fall", smiles her biographer, science journalist Sue Nelson, author from Wally Funk's Race for Space: The Extraordinary Story of a Female Aviation Pioneer.

Wally Funk took his first flight lessons at the age of 9. She is an agile child, dividing her time between her outdoor activities, from bicycling to hunting, and her model balsa airplanes. In high school, the gender barrier stands in her way for the first time. He was forbidden to take mechanics lessons, which were reserved for boys. At university, she was authorized to take the controls and obtained her pilot's license.

The young woman then joined Oklahoma State University, "the best flight school in the United States from the 1950s until the 1970s", according to her story in an interview published in 1999 by NASA (in English). It was then that she became a flight instructor at Fort Still, a military base in Oklahoma.

2She was part of the "Mercury 13"

In the early 1960s, competition between the United States and the USSR for the conquest of space was raging. To prepare a man to go into space, the Americans launched the Mercury program. A doctor involved in the project decides to have women take the selection tests to see if they are able to pass them.

Thirteen candidates are selected, hence the nickname "Mercury 13". Wally Funk is the youngest of them, as told by the Netflix documentary dedicated to these pioneers. The tests to which they are subjected are grueling. "They pushed us to our limits," recalls Wally Funk, who says he "enduring a lot of pain".

"She had to swallow more than 90 cm of rubber tubing to examine the gastric juices in her stomach, writes Sue Nelson in her book. I asked her if it was uncomfortable? 'Oh, my God, yes' , she replied. 'It was kind of a shock. I swallowed so many tubes. But I could take it'."

In another test, the young adult finds herself locked in a tank with perfect sound insulation, filled with water at body temperature, so that she no longer feels anything. Here she is lying in the dark. "I was on my back, floating in this water, without being able to use my five senses," she says. She broke the record, remaining there for 10 hours and 35 minutes.

The "Mercury 13" project demonstrates the value of sending women into space. "Women weigh less and require less food and oxygen," defended one of the "Mercury 13", the American aviator Jerrie Cobb, in an interview with the Canadian channel CBC (in English) in 1963. " Women can work longer sitting in confinement" than men, who would tolerate the "isolation and boredom" of the flight less, she adds, citing the psychologists associated with the project.

However, the program is aborted. NASA doesn't want it. "Wally Funk moved on and kept racing, but she didn't give up," says Sue Nelson. It was not until 1983 that a first American, Sally Ride, joined space, and 1995 for another, Eileen Collins, to become the first to pilot a space shuttle.

3She trained 3,000 pilots

Four times, Wally Funk applied to become an astronaut at NASA. Four times, she suffered refusals. "Because I didn't have an engineering degree, they gave me nine months to get such a degree, which was impossible," she says. The aviator also made the mistake of not having followed a flight program on a military fighter plane. "It was impossible for a girl at the time," she replies.

His race for the stars once again thwarted, Wally Funk pursues his dreams of exploration. An opportunity presents itself "quite by accident", according to her. While she is a pilot and instructor for a company in California and she covets a professorship at the University of Alaska, a member of the United States Aviation Agency (FAA) offers her to become an inspector. for the government agency.

In 1975, after four years in this position, she changed again and became the first investigator of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). She will treat more than 450 accidents until her retirement. Throughout his career in civil and military structures, Wally Funk trained some 3,000 pilots and accumulated 19,600 flight hours.

4She will erase John Glenn's record

At 82, Wally Funk flew into space without fearing the possible consequences of such a trip. "There is no theoretical age limit for going into space, as long as you are medically fit ... She has an incredible pep," said astronaut Jean-François Clervoy, interviewed by franceinfo, who adds that she will have no operational duties to perform up there.

The pioneer will also become the oldest person to fly into space, overtaking John Glenn, the first American to perform an orbital flight in 1962, and who offered himself a last tour in 1998 at the 77 years old. A good snub to misogyny, because this American hero had helped to seal the fate of "Mercury 13". "Men go to war and fly the planes, come back, help design them, build them and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order," he said. to congressional representatives in July 1962, according to The Atlantic.

All his life, Wally Funk tried to prove the contrary. In 1999, she told NASA, "Why can't we fly and go into space? Men today who think we can't as women do things. Sorry, guys, we can."

"Wally sees this as redressing an injustice, according to Sue Nelson, the 'Mercury 13' should have been admitted into NASA's space program, they were ahead of their time." She concludes with a confidence from Wally Funk about her intention to go into space "for all of them": "I've waited a lifetime, honey."