Wally Funk, whose seven-decade quest to reach space finally culminated in a 2021 flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard, has died at 87. Funk's aviation career began in the early 1960s, when she became one of the "Mercury 13," a group of female pilots who underwent the same rigorous physiological testing as NASA's original male astronaut corps under the privately funded Woman in Space Program. Despite outperforming many of her male counterparts on endurance and isolation tests, Funk and the rest of the Mercury 13 were denied the chance to fly because NASA at the time required astronauts to be military jet test pilots, a path formally closed to women. That exclusion did not end her flying career; she went on to become one of the first female FAA safety inspectors and NTSB air safety investigators, and she spent decades as a flight instructor, amassing thousands of hours in the cockpit and training generations of pilots.
For working aviators, Funk's story is a case study in the structural barriers that shaped, and in many ways still shape, who gets to fly professionally. Her exclusion from NASA's astronaut corps despite superior test performance illustrates how credentialing requirements, ostensibly neutral on their face, can function as gatekeeping mechanisms when the underlying pipeline (military test pilot programs, in this case) is itself restricted by gender. That history resonates today as airlines, the military, and business aviation operators continue efforts to widen recruiting pipelines and address persistent underrepresentation of women in cockpits, currently hovering around 5-7% of professional pilots in the U.S. Funk's decades as a CFI and safety inspector also underscore a less glamorous but equally vital career path in aviation: the instructors and inspectors who build the safety culture and training infrastructure the industry depends on, work that rarely draws headlines but is foundational to the profession.
Funk's eventual spaceflight, at age 82 aboard Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin capsule alongside Bezos himself, closed the loop on a 60-year wait and made her briefly the oldest person to fly to space (a record later broken) as well as the oldest woman. That flight also placed her at the center of the broader commercial spaceflight boom, where companies like Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX have begun blurring the lines between aviation and astronautics, creating new categories of pilots, flight crew, and passenger-astronauts. Her presence on that flight was widely read as a symbolic correction to NASA's decision six decades earlier, and it highlighted how commercial space ventures are, in some cases, more willing to take risks on unconventional astronaut candidates than government programs bound by rigid institutional requirements.
More broadly, Funk's death prompts reflection within the aviation community on how far the industry has come, and how far it has to go, on inclusion and access. Her career spanned the introduction of women into FAA and NTSB safety roles, the slow opening of military and airline cockpits to female pilots, and finally the emergence of commercial spaceflight as a venue where civilian aviators can reach orblife-adjacent altitudes without a fighter-pilot pedigree. For today's pilots, particularly women navigating flight training, type ratings, and airline hiring, Funk's persistence, refusing to let a closed door end her aviation ambitions and instead building an alternative and substantial career, remains a frequently cited example in mentorship and advocacy circles focused on expanding the pilot pipeline.