Funk is one of the four passengers on the planned manned flight by Blue Origin, a space tourism company, alongside Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and the winner of the June auction, who bought a ticket for the first sub-orbit New Shepard cruise flight for $ 28 million; his name has not yet been released.
According to the AP agency, Blue Origin chose Funk, who did not make a career as an astronaut several decades ago due to gender. Now he will fly into space as the “guest of honor”.
Funk is one of the Mercury 13 women who received astronaut training in the 1960s but never made it to space or even NASA’s astronaut corps because they were women. Back then, all of NASA’s astronauts were military test pilots and men, the Associated Press points out.
At 82, Funk will become the oldest person to take off into space. It will beat the achievement of the late John Glenn, who flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998 at the age of 77.
“Nobody waited any longer,” Bezos wrote on Instagram, “It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally. We are excited that you will come with us on July 20 as our guest of honor.”
The first New Shepard flight will be a turning point in the development of tourist spaceflight. The ship has already passed the tests without human intervention. New Shepard will ascend about 100 km above the Earth, and the participants of the flight will experience a state of weightlessness for a few minutes.
Bezos, currently the richest man in the world, is racing against fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson, who are also developing commercial space flights. In early July, Branson may join the test flight of the VSS Unity spacecraft developed by his company Virgin Galactic.
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