Loved ones and members of the public gathered Sept. 1 at a Southlake church to celebrate Wally Funk’s life and achievements. She died at age 87 in her Grapevine home earlier this summer.
Funk emerged as a late-life celebrity at 82 years old, when in 2021 she became the oldest person to go to space. Her lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut came true when she was selected for a flight with Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ private space company.
But Funk’s aviation achievements began long before her best-known flight. She became a licensed pilot in her teenage years and a professional aviator not long after.
Funk went on to train as an astronaut with the Woman in Space Program, a short-lived, early Space Race-era initiative that applied the same tests to women as those given to men for the Mercury Project. The baker's dozen of women who completed the program later became known as the "Mercury 13." NASA ultimately rejected women as astronauts at the time.
Funk was the last surviving member of the Mercury 13 and the only one to make it to space.
Grapevine City Council Member Duff O’Dell was a longtime friend and caregiver in Funk’s final years of life. O’Dell, a Delta Airlines employee for over three decades, said Funk had a huge impact on the aviation world.
“She beat her head on a lot of glass ceilings and paved the way,” O’Dell told KERA. “I had a long airline career and it wasn't welcoming to females for a long time, so we owe her a debt of gratitude.”
O’Dell described Funk as an “eternal optimist,” noting that while Funk seemed frustrated with the limitations placed on women, she’d stay positive and assured that she would do what she wanted to do.
“When people — many, many people — said to her, ‘you can't do this because you're female,’ she'd just smile and say, ‘okay, watch me.’ You know, it did not ever discourage her,” O’Dell recalled.
Funk notched a long list of groundbreaking achievements in her career. She was the first female flight instructor at Fort Sill, an Army post in Oklahoma. In the early 1970s, she became the Federal Aviation Administration's first female flight inspector and one of the National Transportation and Safety Board's first female air safety investigators. She logged over 30,000 hours of flight time and trained more than 3,000 pilots.
During the ceremony, retired Air Force colonel and NASA astronaut Eileen Collins praised Funk's legacy as an instructor for up-and-coming aviators.
She said Funk's performance and resilience in the Mercury 13 testing proved women "had the physical and mental ability to handle the stresses of space flight."
Collins said, "My generation of women pilots and women astronauts, we stood on her shoulders as we entered our careers."
According to her wishes, Funk’s ashes will be spread at the Taos, New Mexico mountain range and at an aviation monument near Los Angeles.
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