Trailblazing pilot Wally Fink is finally going to space

Higher, faster, longer. This motto has always allowed Wally Funk to persist in her life, and finally enabled her to realize her lifelong dream: to go to space.

This pioneering female pilot had always dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but was refused work in the 1960s because of her gender. All this will change on Tuesday, because she attaches to the Blue Origin capsule and flies to the universe.

Billionaire Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, and student Oliver Daemen from the Netherlands will complete the work of four passengers during the first manned launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

The rocket will take off from Texas, USA at 8 am local time (13:00 GMT). Daemen, 18, will be the youngest person to enter space, and Funk, 82, will be the oldest.

After decades of being denied access to space because of being a woman, the pilot and flight instructor Wally Funk finally took off [File: Blue Origin]

Women in space

Fink’s obsession with airplanes and aviation began decades ago.

As a child, she used balsa wood to make airplanes, and even took her first flight lesson when she was 9 years old.

When she was a teenager, she obtained a pilot’s license from Stephens College, and then went to Oklahoma State University to study and honed her skills.

In the university’s aviation club, known as “Flying Aggies”, she often outperforms boys.

“I can do all the moves like the boys, if not better,” Fink told Al Jazeera.

She later became a flight instructor. While working at a military base, she heard about an Air Force project to recruit women for the U.S. space program.

In the early 1960s, the “Women in Space” project initiated by William Randolph Lovelace set out to investigate whether women are as capable of handling space flight as men. The pilot Jerrie Cobb who participated in the program named her colleague the First Lady Astronaut Intern.

Wally Fink (second from left) and her first lady astronaut trainee (also known as “Mercury 13”) gathered for a group photo during the space shuttle launch in Florida in 1995. From the left are Gene Nora Jessen, Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Rutley, Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman [File: NASA via AP]

Fink applied, and although she was only 22 years old (the age requirement is technically 25 to 40 years old), she was accepted.

She passed all the tests they performed on her, including more than 10 hours in the sensory deprivation box, surpassing the record set by Mercury astronaut John Glenn.

Despite the smooth passage, Fink was told that she would not become an astronaut after all, because the women’s project was cancelled. This didn’t make Funk any slower.

“I’m not an abandoner,” Fink said. “It’s cancelled? Wally continues. I’m not an abandoner.”

She wrote many times to NASA about becoming an astronaut, but in that era, astronauts were mainly men, either military pilots or engineers. Fink studied education.

So she tried to go back to school to study engineering, but she said she was cancelled because she was a woman.

Funk decided to continue to break through the capabilities of women in the aviation field.

“I took all the exams as much as possible,” she said. “I even went to Russia to participate in their astronaut test and defeated all the boys.”

Failure is not an option

Despite Funk’s success, space is still out of reach. But withdrawal was not her vocabulary, so when a new era of commercial space flight began, she persevered.

Ten years ago, after Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder Richard Branson announced that he would take tourists into space one day, she paid a deposit for Virgin Galactic flights. She didn’t know if she could live to see the day when things happened, but she still wanted to participate in this adventure anyway.

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic, poses with Wally Fink at a party in the hangar of the Commercial Space Company in Mojave Aerospace Port, California, U.S. in 2012 [File: Reed Saxon/AP Photo]

Then, in June, Fink received a call from another space billionaire, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. He invited her to take part in the first flight of his new Shepard rocket on July 20.

The flight on Tuesday will last about 10 minutes in total. During the four minutes, Funk will experience breathtaking views of the earth and experience weightlessness.

The capsule will then land under a parachute in the Texas desert, consolidating the position of the oldest person in space in the history book and replacing astronaut John Glenn who completed the trip at the age of 77.

Need more diversity

Funk’s perseverance story is very inspiring. However, since the founding of NASA (and the entire aerospace industry), her efforts to be included as a woman have plagued NASA.

According to a report by the career platform Zippia, only 12.5% ​​of U.S. aerospace engineers are women, And the statistics have not really changed in the past ten years.

Recently, NASA has taken a big step to welcome more women and people of different backgrounds and races to join.

Currently, it has four centers in the United States led by women-Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Glenn Research Center.

Wally Funk visited the Glenn Research Center in Lewisfield, Cleveland, Ohio in 2019-one of NASA’s now female-led centers [File: NASA via AP]

The deputy director of NASA is also a woman, as is the person in charge of manned spaceflight.

As part of the agency’s Artemis moon landing plan, NASA promised to send the first woman and the first person of color to the moon in the next few years. These astronauts will be tied to the Orion spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin Aerospace, one of NASA’s main contractors.

Lockheed Martin recently opened a new production facility in Florida to help streamline processes and bring more aerospace jobs to the region. The company stated that more than 20% of its leaders are women.

Lockheed Martin’s Orion production director Kelly DeFazio said the company will add at least 40 jobs in Florida, and she hopes that many of these jobs will be allocated to women.

“My father is part of the Apollo project, so it’s really exciting to see the area grow again. We [as Lockheed Martin] I want to be a part of it,” De Fazio told Al Jazeera.

In the office not far away, Subaair is studying NASA’s next large rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). As an Indian-American scientist, she witnessed the need for more diversity.

“I am a mechanical engineer, and even today, you don’t see many women in my field,” Iyer told Al Jazeera.

But after working in the aerospace industry for nearly 30 years, on various projects including the space shuttle and now SLS, Iyer said that she finally saw things change.

“It’s great to be part of this plan,” she said.

“I have teenage boys, so they just see what is happening and what I’m involved in, it will make a difference,” Iyer added. “My children are proud of me.”

One benefit of the booming commercial aerospace sector is that by collaborating with more companies, NASA and other institutions are learning new ways of thinking and innovation, and incorporating more diverse teams.

NASA and the National Science Foundation are also collaborating on a program to help attract people from communities that are currently underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers into the field.

As long as it continues to promote the inclusion of a more diverse workforce, the United States seems ready to continue to be the world leader in the space sector.