Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk, on the first crewed flight into space from his rocket company, Blue Origin later this month.
The 82-year-old woman was one of 13 women who passed NASA‘s astronaut training program in the 1960s but was denied astronaut wings decades ago because of her gender.
After decades of waiting, she is set to become the oldest person to launch into space, Blue Origin said in an announcement on Thursday.
Blue Origin announced that Funk will be aboard the July 20 launch from Texas, flying in the capsule for the 10-minute hop as an “honoured guest.”
Bezos brothers (Jeff and Mark) and Funk, will be joined by the unnamed winner of an auction who paid $28 million for another seat on New Shepard rocket.
“I didn’t think I’d ever get to go up,” Funk excitedly expressed in a video interview posted on the company’s website.
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Funk, then a 21-year-old pilot, was the youngest of the 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA’s program that first sent Americans into space between 1961 and 1963, but were denied the chance to become astronauts themselves because of their gender.
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She was the first female flight instructor at a U.S. military base and the first woman to become an air safety investigator for National Transportation Safety Board.
The spaceship passengers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and be able to marvel at the planet’s curvature through viewing windows before the pressurized passenger capsule returns to earth under parachutes.
Bezos, the richest man on the planet, is stepping down as the chief executive of Amazon on July 5.
He has been vying with fellow billionaires, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to become the first to travel into space on a privately developed rocket.
