As part of a test for potential astronauts in 1961, Wally Funk had cold water squirted into her ears, a rubber tube pushed down her throat and a needle jabbed into the base of one of her thumbs.
Later she was eased into a steel tank of warm water and asked to lie in dark silence as long as she could. After 10 hours and 35 minutes, she was ready for more, but the testers decided she had proved her tolerance for sensory deprivation.
It was fortunate that Funk had an unusual capacity for patience. Though she aced her qualification tests, she had to wait 60 years before finally flying into space.
Meanwhile, she taught more than 3,000 people to fly airplanes, was hired as a safety inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and later became an aviation-accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.
In 2021, when she was 82 years old, Funk was told that Jeff Bezos wanted to meet her. She had never heard of him. In her usual pleased-to-meet-anyone, up-for-anything mode, however, she was happy to oblige. When Bezos invited her to join him and two other people in the first manned (or womaned) suborbital flight of his New Shepard rocket, operated by his Blue Origin space-travel business, she gave him a hug.
Funk would have to walk up eight flights of steps to reach the rocket. No problem, she said. Though she had planned to ride as a paying passenger on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic rocket ship eventually, she was happy to take up the free offer from Bezos instead.
Her flight to the edge of space and back on July 20, 2021, lasted only 10 minutes but gave her a chance to travel at three times the speed of sound and turn somersaults in zero gravity.
Mercury 13
Funk, who died July 8 in Grapevine, Texas, at the age of 87, was one of a group of women who came to be known as the Mercury 13, after the U.S. space program they hoped would send them into space.
Tests of these women in the early 1960s were conducted in Albuquerque, N.M., by William Randolph Lovelace II, a Harvard-trained physician who had worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in devising tests for male astronauts.
NASA hadn't endorsed his female testing, but Lovelace hoped women would be considered for space flights. Partly because they tend to be smaller than men, women might be better adapted to enduring long stretches in a cramped capsule, Lovelace and others suggested. During the tests, women were found to grumble less and in some ways outperform the men.
When NASA made clear that it would consider only men, however, Lovelace abruptly canceled his testing program, before Funk could complete the final phase.
In July 1962, a U.S. House subcommittee held a hearing on whether NASA should reconsider its men-only policy. One of the witnesses was John Glenn, who had recently become the first American to orbit the Earth. "Men fight the wars, fly the planes, come back and design and test them, " he said. "The fact that women haven't cracked this field yet is a result of our social order."
A Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, became the first woman in space in 1963. (On its cover, Life magazine commented: "Soviet Space Girl Makes U.S. Men Sound Stupid.")
NASA didn't launch a woman into space until 1983, when Sally Ride was a crew member on the space shuttle Challenger. Funk watched the shuttle's liftoff on TV. "At that moment, I wanted to be her," she wrote later. "But mostly, I was just happy that NASA had finally flown a female astronaut." (In 1986, Challenger exploded after a launch, killing its seven astronauts including civilian "teacher in space" Christa McAuliffe.)
One great leap
Mary Wallace Funk, who preferred to be called Wally, was born Feb. 1, 1939, to Lozier and Virginia (Shy) Funk. She grew up mostly in Taos, N.M. Her father operated five-and-dime stores.
In a memoir, "Higher, Faster, Longer," she recalled her first, unsuccessful attempt to outwit gravity -- by leaping off the roof of a barn while wearing her Superman costume. She preferred her Erector Set to dolls and made airplanes out of balsa wood. She was the only girl on her high school's rifle team and was annoyed when she was required to take home economics instead of auto mechanics. A back injury ended her dream of becoming an Olympic skier.
Her parents sent her to Stephens College in Columbia, Mo. Though the women's college required students to wear dresses to class, she was allowed to wear trousers for flying lessons, her main interest, and earned her first pilot's license as a teenager.
After transferring to Oklahoma State University, she spent much of her time at the airport, where she helped mechanics, fueled airplanes and mowed the grass between runways. She won trophies as a member of the Flying Aggies aviation team.
She graduated in 1960 and found a $4-an-hour job as a civilian flight instructor at the Army's Fort Sill installation in Oklahoma. While working there, she spotted a Life magazine article about the tests of women hoping to become astronauts. "Wow," she recalled thinking, "I wanted in on this action!"
When the tests hit a dead end, she pursued her aviation career and took time off to travel.
Many people in their 20s take a few months off for a world tour. Funk, accompanied by a black poodle named Little Toot, spent 2 1/2 years exploring 59 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in a Volkswagen camper van.
Old problems, new people
At the National Transportation Safety Board, her specialty was searching for clues at airplane crash sites. Sometimes that meant digging up airplane parts that had lodged themselves into the earth. Other times she had to step over human body parts. She reached remote crash sites on foot or horseback and by rappelling down cliffs. At one site, she found $1 million in cash and bags of cocaine.
Often, she wrote, accidents were caused by people in a hurry, "so they didn't take time for a proper preflight inspection. Or they thought they could beat bad weather, or they thought they were sober or rested enough."
On lecture tours, she tried to teach pilots how to avoid accidents. "After all the crashes I have seen, I've concluded that there are no new kinds of airplane accidents, just new people doing the same old ones," she wrote.
She competed in transcontinental airplane races, dressed in period costumes for historical re-enactments, and collected classic cars, including a 1949 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith that had once belonged to the British royal family. She relished skydiving, flying gliders, ziplining, bungee jumping and just about anything else that involved hurtling through the air. She also had the patience to sit through operas.
"I realized I didn't want to be tied down with a marriage," she wrote. "I often say that I am married to airplanes."
Among the Mercury 13, Funk was perhaps the most exuberant, always eager to talk about her experiences and pose for pictures. That stirred some resentment. "She's been pretending to be an astronaut" since 1961, Jerri Truhill, one of the other Mercury 13 test participants, told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. "I don't think she's got a chance in hell of flying into space. But she's great at promoting herself."
The general public loved her story, though. After she returned from her Blue Origin space flight, Funk received thousands of phone calls and cards of congratulation from strangers around the world.
Her neighbors in Grapevine, where she was a regular at the Original Pancake House, were especially proud of her. The marquee at the town's Palace Theatre read: "Welcome back to Earth Wally Funk."