Airline pioneer Wally Funk will join Blue’s first production aircraft
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Sixty years of success in Mercury 13 program, Wally Funk has finally gone into space. Amazon CEO and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has announced on Instagram that Funk will be on his first trip to New Shepard, which is scheduled for July 20th.
Funk has teamed up with Bezos, his brother Mark and the undisputed success of the market as passengers of the original Blue Origin aircraft. Bezos says the quartet will have a gravitational pull for four minutes as it moves towards the end of the space and that Funk is Blue “honored guest”.
Funk, 82, will be the largest flying in the sky. The current historian is John Glenn, who flew on the STS-95 Space Shuttle Discovery mission in 1998 at the age of 77. Glenn was one of Mercury Seven’s astronomers, who was selected to be the first flying program in the United States.
Thirteen women underwent similar tests to Mercury Seven as part of the Women in Space Program which pays a fee. Though all Mercury Seven went into space, none of the Mercury 13 has them so far. Funk was the last to participate in the program and voted a third among the elect.
Funk was the first female supervisor in the Federal Aviation Administration and the first mother to be an air safety researcher with the National Transportation Safety Board. He has spent more than 19,600 hours and trained more than 3,000 people to fly. Funk signed up three times to join the NASA astronaut program when the agency opened up to women in the late 1970s but to no avail. Sixty years after Funk’s first attempt to go into space, they’ve got a chance.
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