{"id":17531,"date":"2021-07-01T22:13:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T14:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/mercury-13-woman-aviator-wally-funk-will-ride-with-jeff-bezos-on-blue-origin-suborbital-space-trip\/"},"modified":"2021-07-01T22:13:00","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T14:13:00","slug":"mercury-13-woman-aviator-wally-funk-will-ride-with-jeff-bezos-on-blue-origin-suborbital-space-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/mercury-13-woman-aviator-wally-funk-will-ride-with-jeff-bezos-on-blue-origin-suborbital-space-trip\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Mercury 13\u2019 woman aviator Wally Funk will ride with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin suborbital space trip"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_628579\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-628579\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-628579\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/210701-wally-630x347.jpg\" alt=\"Jeff Bezos and Wally Funk\" width=\"630\" height=\"347\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/210701-wally-630x347.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/210701-wally-1260x694.jpg 1260w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/210701-wally-768x423.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/210701-wally-1536x846.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/210701-wally.jpg 1675w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-628579\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Female aviation pioneer Wally Funk goes wide-eyed when discussing spaceflight with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Instagram Video \/ Jeff Bezos)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture has rounded out the foursome for its first crewed suborbital spaceflight with a pioneering woman aviator: Wally Funk, one of the \u201cMercury 13\u201d women who went through testing for spaceflight but never flew to space.<\/p>\n<p>Funk will sit alongside Bezos and his brother Mark, plus the yet-to-be-identified beneficiary of a $28 million charity auction, when Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spaceship lifts off from its West Texas launch pad on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.<\/p>\n<p>In a video posted today to Instagram and YouTube, Bezos talks with the 82-year-old Funk about the flight \u2014 and Funk goes wide-eyed when the world\u2019s richest individual asks what she\u2019ll do when it\u2019s finished.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that was the best thing that ever happened to me,\u2019 and give you a hug!\u201d Funk replies as she throws her arms around Bezos.<\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"instagram-media instagram-media-rendered\" id=\"instagram-embed-0\" src=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/tv\/CQyQ_asFQEO\/embed\/captioned\/?cr=1&amp;v=14&amp;wp=987&amp;rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geekwire.com&amp;rp=%2F2021%2Fmercury-13-woman-aviator-wally-funk-will-ride-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-suborbital-space-trip%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A1437.6449999399483%7D\" allowtransparency=\"true\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"755\" data-instgrm-payload-id=\"instagram-media-payload-0\" scrolling=\"no\" style=\"background: white; max-width: 658px; width: calc(100% - 2px); border-radius: 3px; border: 1px solid rgb(219, 219, 219); box-shadow: none; display: block; margin: 0px 0px 12px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><script async=\"\" src=\"\/\/platform.instagram.com\/en_US\/embeds.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Choosing Funk serves as a nod to America\u2019s early space history \u2014 just as the name of Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital spaceflight is a nod to the late Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It also serves to ensure that the crew for this month\u2019s milestone flight won\u2019t just be four white guys. Funk would become the oldest person to go into space, breaking the record set by the late senator-astronaut John Glenn when he flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1998 at the age of 77.<\/p>\n<p>In a parallel universe, Funk might have been one of Glenn\u2019s crewmates.<\/p>\n<p>She was already a professional aviator when she took part in the privately funded Women in Space research program in 1961, at the age of 22. The program, which had the support of NASA but was not officially sponsored by the government, ran 13 women through the medical and psychological tests that NASA used for its male astronauts.<\/p>\n<p>Some had hoped that the Mercury 13 would open the way for women to join NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in the 1960s \u2014 but that didn\u2019t happen until 1978, after the last Apollo moon mission and before the first space shuttle mission. (In the Apple TV+ alternate-history series \u201cFor All Mankind,\u201d a moonwalking character named Molly Cobb is arguably inspired by Wally Funk and Mercury 13 crewmate Jerrie Cobb.)<\/p>\n<p>Funk, the youngest member of the Mercury 13, went on to become the first female flight inspector at the Federal Aviation Administration, and one of the first female air safety investigators at the National Transportation and Safety Board. She has 19,600 hours of flight experience, and has taught more than 3,000 people to fly.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEverything the FAA has, I\u2019ve got the license for,\u201d Funk said in the Instagram video. \u201cAnd I can outrun you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Blue Origin says Funk\u2019s selection rounds out the four-person crew for its first crewed flight. The 21-year-old company has put the autonomously controlled New Shepard spaceship through 15 uncrewed tests since 2015. After the 15th test in April, Bezos declared that \u201cit\u2019s time\u201d to put people on board, and said that he and his brother would be among the first.<\/p>\n<p>The identity of the person who won a seat in last month\u2019s $28 million auction is expected to be revealed any day now. Proceeds from that sale will go to the Club for the Future, Blue Origin\u2019s non-profit STEM educational foundation.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"75-year-old woman fights to go to space\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/joXDjESzPPk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Funk and the rest of the foursome are due to go through a couple of days of pre-flight training at Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital launch center near Van Horn, Texas, and then experience an up-and-down flight that will last about 10 minutes and rise above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) height that marks the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.<\/p>\n<p>At that altitude, the crew will experience about four minutes of weightlessness and get a spaced-out view of the curving Earth through the New Shepard craft\u2019s giant picture windows. Then they\u2019ll descend to a parachute-aided landing amid the rangeland of West Texas.<\/p>\n<p>Years ago, Funk used the proceeds from her book and movie royalties as well as her inheritance to buy a ride into space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane. Virgin Galactic is still gearing up to begin commercial operations sometime in the next year \u2014 but now Funk is in line to get a free ride to space, courtesy of Bezos.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019ll love every second of it,\u201d Funk says on video. \u201cWoohoo! Ha ha, I can hardly wait!\u201d<\/p>\n<h4><b>Update:<\/b> Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson aims to upstage Jeff Bezos<br \/>\n<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Female aviation pioneer Wally Funk goes wide-eyed when discussing spaceflight with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Instagram Video \/ Jeff Bezos) Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture has rounded out the foursome for its first crewed suborbital spaceflight with a pioneering woman aviator: Wally Funk, one of the \u201cMercury 13\u201d women who went through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,1046,1250,493,4402,4737],"class_list":["post-17531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-new-shepard","tag-space-tourism","tag-suborbital-spaceflight","tag-wally-funk"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}