Wally Funk stepped out of a Blue Origin capsule in the West Texas desert on July 20, 2021, grinning, arms thrown wide. At 82, she had just become the oldest person yet to fly to space, a moment sixty years in the making. Funk, the aviator and last surviving member of the Mercury 13, was 87 when she died on July 8, 2026, in Grapevine, Texas, where she had lived for decades.

She was born Mary Wallace Funk on February 1, 1939, and grew up in Taos, New Mexico. At 16 she enrolled at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where she joined the school's flying club and had her pilot's license within a year, according to the Lone Star Flight Museum, which later inducted her into its Hall of Fame. Flying was never something she treated as a phase. By 22 she had already collected a full set of top aviation ratings and become a professional certified pilot. She went on to log more than 19,600 hours in the air over her career and to teach roughly 3,000 students to fly, according to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

In 1961 she underwent astronaut fitness testing as part of NASA's Project Mercury era, becoming the youngest of the thirteen women who came to be known as the Mercury 13. The exams were exhaustive. "X-raying all over your body, every bone, every tooth, sticking water into your ears. I had to drink radioactive water," she told CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller, recalling the program decades later. In one test, researchers sealed her inside a sensory deprivation tank; she stayed in it more than ten hours, until the researchers, ready to go home themselves, finally ended it. "We had no idea what we were going through. We didn't know where it was taking us." In some of the exams, Funk outperformed the men NASA was testing at the same time for its own astronaut corps. Of the thirteen candidates, only Funk and Jerrie Cobb went on to complete all three phases of testing. She and the other women passed. NASA never sent any of them to space. Though it became common to say the Mercury 13 were excluded purely because of their gender, Funk maintained throughout her life that in her own case the deciding factor was that she lacked an engineering degree, a credential NASA required of its astronaut corps. Not all thirteen even knew one another; it was not until 1994 that ten of them met for the first time.

She kept flying anyway. In 1968 she earned her Airline Transport Pilot rating, aviation's highest license, and was turned down for pilot jobs by one airline after another because she was a woman. She found other firsts instead: the first female civilian flight instructor at a U.S. military base, the Federal Aviation Administration's first female flight inspector, and in 1974, the National Transportation Safety Board's first female air safety investigator. For sixty years she belonged to the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of licensed women pilots active in 44 countries. She never married. In her own words, she was "married to airplanes."

When Blue Origin offered her a seat on the first crewed flight of its New Shepard rocket, she said only this ahead of the launch: "I'm going. That is my quest. ... I love flying, that's my job, that's what I love. And I'm not a quitter." She lifted off from Blue Origin's Launch Site One in West Texas on July 20, 2021, alongside Jeff Bezos and two other crewmates, on a flight that lasted about ten minutes from liftoff to capsule landing, according to SpaceNews. She came down the oldest person to have flown to space, breaking a record John Glenn had held since 1998. The record was hers for less than three months. Guinness World Records had clocked her exact age that day at 82 years and 169 days; that October, actor William Shatner flew on a later New Shepard mission at 90 and took the title from her.

Grapevine, the town she called home, threw her a parade down Main Street that summer. "We're very proud of our longtime friend and resident Wally Funk," Mayor William D. Tate said. "She's been a pacesetter her entire life and her accomplishments are well-known." The following March, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum presented her with its Michael Collins Trophy for Lifetime Achievement at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. In 2024 the Lone Star Flight Museum inducted her into its Hall of Fame as an Aviation Trailblazer.

What Funk leaves is countable in the specifics she earned one flight hour at a time: more than 19,600 hours logged, roughly 3,000 students taught to fly, sixty years of Ninety-Nines membership, a Michael Collins Trophy for Lifetime Achievement, a place in the Lone Star Flight Museum's Hall of Fame. She was, at her death, the last of the thirteen women who passed NASA-era astronaut testing in 1961 and were sent home anyway, and one of only two of them, alongside Jerrie Cobb, who ever completed every phase of it. Six decades later, at 82, she went up regardless.