By akademiotoelektronik, 15/12/2022

Who is Wally Funk, who will leave in space with Jeff Bezos?

On July 20, if all is well, Mary Wallace Funk, 82, will be alongside the American billionaire Jeff Bezos for the first inhabited flight of his New Shepard space capsule.The native of Las Vegas will then become the oldest person to go to space, beating the record of the American astronaut and senator John Glenn.The latter had made a final flight aboard the Discovery space shuttle in 1998, at 77 years old.For Mary Wallace, known as "Wally", private flight alongside Jeff Bezos is a great revenge on history.

Early 1960s.The American space agency, NASA, recruits its first astronauts so as not to be distanced by the Soviet Union.Significant prerequisites: they must be qualified army pilots.An inaccessible position for women, who find themselves excluded from the race for space.

→ Reread.For its future starves, Europe is looking for women

William Randolph Lovelace, military doctor, is chosen to develop physical and psychological tests in order to select the best of the best.Close friend of Jacqueline Cochran, first woman to have crossed the sound wall, the doctor wonders if women would succeed in tests and, more generally, how female biology would behave in the absence of gravity.

The Mercury 13, a net stopped program

Unofficially and without any program being defined by NASA, Randy Lovelace therefore selects several women pilots, and invites them to take the events to which Alan Shepard, John Glenn and their friends submit.Thanks to word of mouth, around twenty women, sometimes accumulating more hours of flights than their male counterparts, appears on the Catimini between 1960 and 1961.At 22, Wally Funk, a strong head and an outstanding aviator, is the youngest of the 13 selected, a group that history will nickname, years later, the "Mercury 13".

The female program, entirely funded by the private funds of Cochran, comes up against the final test phase.To try weightlessness, you must use military facilities.And if NASA can look at this research as long as they only involve Randy Lovelace, out of the question to go further.Less than two years after the beginnings, trials to select astronaut women stop suddenly.

Rejoindre l’espace ? « Enfin !»»

Wally Funk, for his part, held up her luck to join the body of astronauts in the late 1970s, when NASA finally decided to recruit women.But for lack of an engineering diploma or a military career, she was again failed.The passionate about old cars finally became the first female inspector of the American aviation agency, the FAA.

→ Reread.NASA chooses SpaceX for its next mission inhabited towards the moon

Learning that she was going to join the space, Wally Funk exclaimed "Finally!»»."They told me that I had done the work better and faster than any of the men," she says in a video posted on the Instagram account of Jeff Bezos, Thursday July 1.But no one wanted to take me.I didn't think I would go up there one day.»»