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In 1961, a 21-year-old pilot named Wally Funk sat through the same brutal battery of tests NASA was giving its male astronaut candidates — the tilt tables, the isolation tanks, the ice water in the ears, the treadmills pushed past the point most grown men tapped out. She didn’t tap out. She passed. She was, by every measure NASA had, ready to go to space.
She didn’t get there for another 60 years.
Funk died on July 8, 2026, at 87, in an assisted living facility in Grapevine, Texas, after complications from a fall and a leg infection. By the time she passed, she’d already done the thing almost everyone who knew her story assumed she never would: she’d flown. This is the story of the six decades in between — and what she did with all of them.
The Woman NASA Tested but Never Sent Up
Funk was the youngest of thirteen women who went through the “Woman in Space” program — an unofficial, privately funded effort in the early 1960s to find out whether women could physically and psychologically handle spaceflight as well as men. History remembers them now as the Mercury 13. They ran the exact same physical and mental testing regimen given to the seven men who became NASA’s first official astronauts. Several of the women, Funk among them, outperformed some of their male counterparts on isolation and sensory-deprivation tests designed to simulate the psychological strain of spaceflight.
None of it mattered in the way it should have. NASA had no official pathway for women astronauts in 1961 — the program wasn’t run by NASA, had no government backing, and quietly folded before any of the thirteen women ever got near a launchpad. The men Funk tested alongside became household names. Funk went back to flying.
Sixty Years of Not Giving Up on It
What she did with the rejection is the part of the story that tends to get skipped in favor of the ending. Funk didn’t get bitter and she didn’t get quiet. She kept flying — logging more than 19,000 flight hours over her career, becoming one of the first women to work as a civilian flight instructor for the U.S. military and one of the first female air safety investigators in the country, a job that meant walking into plane crash sites and figuring out what went wrong so it wouldn’t happen again.
And she kept applying. Funk tried to get to space again and again over the decades — through NASA’s later programs, through Russia’s space agency, through anyone who might say yes. She got turned down every time, for reasons that had nothing to do with her ability and everything to do with circumstances she didn’t control: her age, her gender, the politics of who got picked and when. She talked about it publicly for years, matter-of-fact, not looking for sympathy. She just kept showing up ready.
July 20, 2021
On the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Wally Funk finally flew. She was 82 years old, strapped into Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule alongside company founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen, on the very first crewed flight of that spacecraft. The trip lasted about eleven minutes — past the edge of space and back. It was enough. She became, at that moment, the oldest person to ever travel to space, a record that stood for a few months before it was broken — fittingly, by a 90-year-old actor who’d once played a fictional starship captain.
Funk told reporters afterward that she’d waited her “whole doggone life” for that flight. Not most of her life. All of it. From age 21 to age 82. Sixty years is longer than most of the physical evidence from the early space race has even lasted — the flags astronauts planted on the moon have reportedly bleached white in less time than Funk spent waiting for her turn.
What the Sixty Years Actually Prove
Here’s the part of Wally Funk’s story that’s easy to miss if you only remember the eleven minutes in the capsule: for almost the entire wait, there was no evidence it was ever going to happen. No timeline. No promise from anyone in a position to keep it. Just a woman who’d already proven she was capable, watching year after year pass with nothing to show for it except more flight hours and more rejections.
There’s an idea running through nearly every tradition that’s ever tried to make sense of a long wait like that — older than the space program, older than aviation, older than most of what we consider modern life. It’s the idea that a delay isn’t the same thing as a denial. That something can be true and real and already decided long before there’s any visible sign of it. Whether or not you believe there’s a God keeping track of any of it, Funk’s sixty years are a strange, real-world argument for the possibility that waiting itself might not be wasted time — that it might just be time nobody’s finished using yet.
She Didn’t Wait Quietly, and Maybe That’s the Real Lesson
Funk isn’t remembered today as someone who waited well in the passive sense — sitting still, hoping. She waited by staying ready. She kept her hours current, kept applying, kept showing up as the pilot she’d always been, for six decades, with no guarantee any of it would lead anywhere. When the door finally opened, she didn’t need to become ready. She already was. It’s a different posture than the one most people default to when a dream stalls out — and it lines up with the idea, explored in the pull that big, long-held dreams seem to have on us in the first place, that they rarely let go quietly, even when the timeline makes no sense.
What do you think — is there something you’re still waiting on?
Not everyone gets an eleven-minute flight at 82 to prove the wait meant something. Most of us never get that kind of clean, public ending. So here’s the real question Wally Funk’s life leaves behind: if you’re in a season where the thing you’re waiting for shows no sign of arriving, does that change what you do with the waiting — or does it just make you tired of it? For anyone in that exact spot right now, there’s a simple one-week practice built for that specific kind of impossible-feeling wait worth trying before you decide the wait is wasted.
Share This
- “Wally Funk passed NASA’s astronaut tests in 1961. She didn’t get to space until 2021 — at 82. She waited 60 years and never stopped being ready. Her story just made me rethink what ‘wasted time’ even means.”
- “RIP Wally Funk. Passed every test NASA gave its male astronauts in 1961. Finally flew to space in 2021, at 82 years old. 60 years. She never stopped showing up ready. That’s the whole story right there.”
- “The pilot who waited 60 years to fly to space just died at 87 — and her story is less about space and more about what you do with a wait that has no end date. Worth five minutes.”
Common Questions About Wally Funk
Who was Wally Funk?
Wally Funk (Mary Wallace Funk) was an American aviator and one of the “Mercury 13,” a group of thirteen women who privately underwent the same physical and psychological astronaut testing NASA gave its male candidates in the early 1960s. She logged more than 19,000 flight hours over her career and became one of the first female flight instructors and air safety investigators in the United States.
Did Wally Funk ever go to space?
Yes. On July 20, 2021, at age 82, Funk flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard on the company’s first crewed spaceflight, alongside Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, and Oliver Daemen. At the time, she became the oldest person to ever fly to space.
Why didn’t NASA ever send Wally Funk to space?
The “Woman in Space” testing program Funk took part in in 1961 was privately funded and never an official NASA program. NASA had no pathway for women astronauts at the time, and the program folded before any of the thirteen women who passed testing were sent up. Funk applied repeatedly to NASA and other space programs over the following decades and was turned down each time.
How did Wally Funk die?
Funk died on July 8, 2026, at age 87, in an assisted living facility in Grapevine, Texas, from complications following a recent fall and a leg infection.
What is the Mercury 13?
The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who underwent the same rigorous astronaut testing regimen as NASA’s original Mercury Seven male astronauts in the early 1960s, as part of a privately funded program. Despite passing the tests — several outperforming their male counterparts on parts of it — none flew to space through the program, which had no official government backing and was not affiliated with NASA.
