Wally Funk and the Mercury 13 – the women who would be astronauts

Spaceflight pioneer, Wally Funk, has been invited to fly on the first human flight of the New Shepard - a suborbital human spacecraft built by Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight company Blue Origin. Funk was one of a group of women known as the Mercury 13. All of them expert pilots, the women wanted to join the elite ranks of the candidate Mercury astronauts. On 9 April 1959, the Mercury 13 went through a gruelling set of medical tests at the Lovelace Clinic to be allowed to be cleared for flight. Despite excelling at the tests, NASA rules stated astronaut candidates needed jet flight experience. As women couldn’t fly jets, they were effectively banned from the astronaut programme. Wally never gave up on her dream however, and has been hoping to go to space ever since. We talked to her back in 2019 about her desire to travel into space.