While all eyes were on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos Tuesday morning, sitting alongside him was a woman named Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who, by 10 a.m., became the oldest person to rocket into space.
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She was one of the passengers on the “New Shepard” launched by Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and space flight company founded by Bezos, who was also aboard the rocket that blasted off from West Texas.
While Funk was strapped into the rocket, friends of hers at White’s Chapel Church in Southlake gathered in their sanctuary to watch the historic event.
A few weeks ago, Laurie Williams, who serves as the director of the seniors ministry at the church, told KTVT-TV that Funk “is a living testimony that you can do anything you set your mind to.”
Her friends saw her testimony in action Tuesday.
The congregation gathered at the church shouted out a countdown as they watched their beloved friend see her greatest dream materialize.
“I cried ugly tears whenever I found out that she’s getting this opportunity,” Williams said of learning Funk would finally have the chance to journey into outer space. “Beyond just being a national, international hero to so many and to females, for her to have her dreams realized — for her to know that God sees her and sees her dreams and is making it happen — I cannot wait.”
It was certainly a monumental event not just for Funk, but for the history of space flight. In the 1960s, Funk was part of the so-called “Mercury 13,” a crew of women selected by NASA for the privately funded “Women in Space” program.
Although Funk, who was 23 years old at the time, went through all the requisite astronaut training — even finishing at the top of her class — neither she nor any of her other female cohorts ever journeyed into outer space, because they were women.
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She never lost her passion, though. Despite not being permitted to go into space because of her sex, Funk taught more than 3,000 people to fly and, according to Williams, has successfully “investigated many crash scenes for the government” and “still knows how to analyze some of those scenes.”
Even still, Funk remained committed to her dream.
“She has wanted to go up in space,” Williams told the local news outlet. “That comes up in conversations all the time with her and, you know, recently she was saying she didn’t know she’d be able to go up or not now. And I just kept telling her to believe in it.”
It looks like now Funk has her answer.
On Tuesday morning, she rocketed to the edge of outer space, crossing the so-called Karman line, an imaginary boundary considered to be the end of the earth’s atmosphere and the beginning of space.
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