Wally Funk finally flying at eighty-two

If you think your entry-level job treated you poorly, consider Wally Funk. In the early 1960s, she was one of thirteen women who passed the same rigorous physical and psychological tests that NASA used to select the Mercury 7 astronauts. She scored in the top two percent of all candidates—male or female. Her reward? NASA told her women couldn’t be astronauts. Then they let her wait fifty-eight years. In July 2021, at eighty-two years old, Wally Funk strapped into Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, rode past the Kármán line, and spent four minutes floating in zero gravity. She didn’t do it to prove a point. She did it because she never stopped wanting to fly. That’s the kind of stubborn, unsentimental drive that separates people who merely talk about their dreams from people who actually live them.

Wally Funk didn’t fall into flying by accident. She took her first flight lesson at sixteen, soloed a plane before she could legally drive a car, and earned every pilot’s license she could get her hands on—commercial, flight instructor, instrument, multi-engine, seaplane, glider. By her twenties, she had logged more flying hours than most male pilots twice her age. But when NASA shut her out of the Mercury program, she didn’t waste time nursing grudges. She kept flying. She worked as a flight instructor, a safety inspector for the National Transportation Safety Board, and even taught hundreds of student pilots how to handle emergencies. She never wrote a tell-all book. She never did a victory lap on social media. She just kept racking up hours in the cockpit, knowing that the only real answer to being told “no” is to keep moving forward.

That forward motion finally intersected with Jeff Bezos’s space ambitions. Blue Origin invited Funk to fly as an “honored guest” on its first crewed suborbital flight, alongside Bezos, his brother Mark, and an eighteen-year-old Dutch student. When she launched from West Texas, she became the oldest person to fly in space—a record previously held by John Glenn, who flew on the Space Shuttle at seventy-seven. Funk beat that by five years. The flight lasted just over ten minutes, from liftoff to landing, but those ten minutes were the culmination of a life spent waiting for a door that someone else had locked. She didn’t need the cosmic view to feel vindicated. The view was a bonus. What mattered was the ride itself.

Now, you might ask: why does this matter to you? You’re in your twenties. You’ve got your own career ladder to climb, your own rejections to absorb. The space industry is opening up faster than it ever has—private companies are launching rockets, building space stations, and planning lunar landings. You could realistically spend your career working in or alongside that industry. But the people who will make that happen aren’t the ones who burn out after the first rejection. They’re the ones like Wally Funk, who treat “no” as a starting point rather than a finish line. She wasn’t bitter. She wasn’t loud. She was just relentless.

The larger lesson here isn’t about gender or spaceflight specifically. It’s about human endurance. Funk didn’t need NASA to validate her abilities. She validated them herself, every time she took off from a runway without a second thought. When you strip away the rocket exhaust and the media interviews, what you’re left with is a woman who refused to let other people’s limitations define her life. She didn’t write a manifesto. She didn’t wait for permission. She just kept her hands on the controls and her eyes on the horizon. That’s how you crush the space game. That’s how you crush any game.

So when you hear people complain that they “didn’t get their shot,” remember Wally Funk. She got her shot at eighty-two. She took it without a trace of resentment, without a speech about what might have been. She just buckled in, rode the fire, and came back smiling. If you want to be part of the future of space travel—or any field that requires grit—stop waiting for someone to hand you a seat. Build your own engine. And if you have to wait half a century, make sure you’re still fit enough to handle the G-forces when your turn finally arrives.