The new “right stuff,” that special set of qualities that once made American spacefarers seem almost mythical, is money and luck. But the agency is no longer space’s gatekeeper, either. Today, NASA has different requirements for its astronauts prospective candidates can have degrees in other science fields, not just engineering. Funk continued flying beneath Earth’s atmosphere, going on to become a safety inspector at the Federal Aviation Administration, the first woman in such a role. She applied to NASA’s astronaut corps four times, but the agency wanted its astronauts to have engineering degrees, and Funk didn’t have one. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” That fact stuck for more than two decades, until Sally Ride launched into orbit in 1983.īy then, Funk was in her 40s and still eager to fly to space. In 1962, a congressional hearing considered the question of adding women to its astronaut corps, and Glenn, fresh off his historic journey, dismissed the possibility: “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The doctor had wanted to run more tests using military facilities, and although Lovelace was affiliated with NASA, military officials were unenthusiastic about the idea and wouldn’t allow it. Thirteen of 19 women, including Funk, ended up passing the examinations, compared with 18 of 32 men in NASA’s program.īut the women in Lovelace’s program never had a chance to fully prove their mettle. “Since … the ships for it have not been designed yet, some of the other women astronauts will have passed the age limit,” she said in an interview with the San Pedro News-Pilot in 1962. Funk thought her early start would help her as NASA pushed forward with its space effort. In 1960, she became the first female flight instructor at her training school in Oklahoma. She had been fascinated by planes since she was a child, and got her pilot’s license as a teenager. Read: Why women weren’t allowed to be astronautsįunk was 22 years old when she joined Lovelace’s program, the youngest of the group. The screenings were meant to push participants to exhaustion as no one knew yet the toll spaceflight would have on a human body, sending astronauts at peak fitness seemed like an important hedge for success. ![]() In the early 1960s, Funk and the others underwent the same intense barrage of physical and psychological tests that Lovelace had developed for the NASA men. Lovelace recruited female pilots under 40, matching the age requirements of NASA’s real astronaut corps. Randy Lovelace, the doctor in charge of the effort, had worked with NASA’s male astronauts, and he suspected that women might fare just as well, or even better, than men in the tiny, cramped spaceships that NASA had planned women are, on average, lighter and smaller, and would require less food and oxygen, scientists suggested at the time. Glenn was part of the Mercury program, NASA’s first attempt to send men-and, at the time, only men-to space, while Funk participated in a privately funded project meant to see how women held up to the pressures of spaceflight. Glenn and Funk took their isolation tests during the exhilarating beginnings of the American space program, but their experiences didn’t overlap. ![]() At 82, she is poised to become the oldest person to fly to space-a record currently held by Glenn, who went to space for the last time when he was 77 years old. Three weeks from now, Funk will blast off into the sky, experience a few glorious minutes of weightlessness, and come back down. Funk never flew to space, and most people had probably never heard of her until today, when Jeff Bezos announced that Funk would join him on his journey to space, aboard his own rocket, built by his company Blue Origin. He died in 2016, the last member of NASA’s first class of astronauts. Glenn went on to become the first American to orbit Earth and one of the most recognizable names in American spaceflight. She emerged 10 hours and 35 minutes later, not because she was done, but because the doctor administering the test decided it might be time to pull her out. She couldn’t see, hear, or feel anything. He walked out three hours later.įor her test, Wally Funk floated inside a tank of water in a dark, soundproofed room. He found some paper in the darkness, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, and spent the test writing some poems in silence. ![]() Spaceflight wasn’t going to be easy, and the country wanted people with tough minds.įor his test, John Glenn sat at a desk in a dark, soundproofed room. In the beginning, the small group of Americans who aspired to become astronauts had to pass an isolation test.
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