Wally Funk: meet the 82-year-old jetting into space with Jeff Bezos

The moon would be more interesting with Wally Funk on it, and clearly Jeff Bezos agrees: the entrepreneur has just invited the 82-year-old female aerospace pioneer to join him on his inaugural space flight later this month. 

In 1961, when she was 22, Wally took the physical tests to become an astronaut. They were grisly – ice-cream was dripped in her ears and she stayed in a floatation tank for almost eleven hours. She performed better than John Glenn – the vainest of the original Mercury 7 astronauts – but the tests were cancelled. No American woman entered space until Sally Ride in 1983.

But Funk is too interesting to reduce to a fable about misogyny. Spacemen were sexist – who knew? I interviewed a Battle of Britain pilot two years ago and was surprised – although I shouldn’t have been – to learn that we were saved from the Nazis by sexists.