Wally Funk, a North Texas aviation pioneer and the oldest person to ever go to space, has died. She was 87.
The city of Grapevine announced her death Thursday, calling her a 鈥済lobal symbol of determination, perseverance and excellence.鈥�
Funk, born in 1939, was known for breaking gender barriers for women in aviation. She earned her pilot's license at 17.
She was one of 13 women selected the First Lady Astronaut Trainees program 鈥� also known as Mercury 13 鈥� passing the same physical and mental tests as NASA's astronauts, though the agency did not allow women to become astronauts at the time.
"I'm not going to sit back and pine over anything," Funk said in with one of her flight students, Mary Holsenbeck. "I applied to NASA four times. And finally, they said, 'Wally, we're sorry. But you don't have an engineering degree. I said, 'well, I'll get one.
"So I never let anything stop me."
Funk went on to have a decades-long career in aviation: According to the city of Grapevine, she was one of the first female flight instructors at Fort Still, Oklahoma, and the first woman inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration. She also trained more than 3,000 pilots as a flight instructor.
"Her main passion, the things she'd rather do than breathe and eat, was to fly, and that's just who she was," Grapevine City Council member Duff O鈥橠ell, a friend of Funk鈥檚, told 四虎影院. "She was a flyer, and she loved airplanes and being up in the sky more than anything in the world. "
In 2021, at the age of 82, Funk became the oldest person to go to space, joining the crew of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos鈥� Blue Origin New Shepard NS-16 mission. She was the only member of Mercury 13 to make it to space.
In 2024, she was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame.
"Wally was a true force of nature, and I mean that in every sense of the word," O'Dell said. "She just was one of the most dynamic, interesting, there's just not enough great adjectives to use to describe the exuberance that was Wally Funk."
Avery Escamilla-Wendell is 四虎影院鈥檚 news intern. Got a tip? Email Avery at aescamillawendell@kera.org. You can follow heron Instagram @by_avery_escamilla.
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