Grapevine honors Wally Funk, the woman who worked for decades to get into space
Grapevine honored Wally Funk, the woman who became the oldest person to go into space, with a parade, celebration and a proclamation of Saturday as Wally Funk Day.
Funk, 82, ventured into space as a tourist on July 20 when she boarded Jeff Bezos’ Blue origin rocket and went with Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the youngest person in space and son of millionaire Dutch businessman Joes Daemen. During their journey, they hung at a low Earth orbit altitude and experienced weightlessness for three minutes.
Funk outperformed male contenders for space flight in the 1960s as part of the Mercury 13 program, but it was shut down. It is commonly held the program was shut down because NASA wanted to send only men into space, but Funk was adamant Saturday that the only reason she wasn’t selected was because she didn’t have an engineering degree.
Grapevine Mayor William D. Tate said after the parade that Funk’s career as an aviator was inspiring enough on its own, but her venture out of the Earth’s atmosphere made her a true hometown hero.
“We witnessed it ourselves and it was such a great achievement,” Tate said. “I call upon her fellow Grapevine residents to honor and recognize Wally’s ability to break gender barriers in a male dominated profession and her positive perseverance to pursue spaceflight despite repeated delays and obstructions. These are all testaments to her strength of character and her love of life.”
A couple hundred people gathered at Grapevine’s historic downtown to see Funk ride in a white convertible down Main street, holding a mannequin dressed in the flight suit she wore on her four-minute space vacation.
When Funk came to the stage after the parade she was greeted with thunderous applause from neighbors and admirers. She said it was an experience of a lifetime and she is definitely going back into space with Bezos.
“The whole thing was so fantastic,” Funk said. “I could float around in space for three whole minutes.”
She said she’d experienced weightlessness when testing to be a Russian Cosmonaut, so she knew what to do there. But, she said, when they started coming down to Earth it was a unique experience.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Funk said. “This was the most fabulous thing of my life.”