Wally Funk, an American aviation pioneer who spent six decades fighting for her place among the stars before finally reaching space at the age of 82, died Wednesday at her home in Grapevine, Texas — a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth — at the age of 87. Funk had suffered a leg infection and had fallen several times in recent weeks. Grapevine City Councilwoman Duff O'Dell, who served as Funk's caregiver, said she was by her side at the end.

Funk's journey to space was one of the most improbable in aviation history. In the early 1960s, she was among 13 female pilots — a group later known as the Mercury 13 — who underwent the same rigorous physical and psychological tests as NASA's all-male astronaut corps through a private programme. Funk performed exceptionally, graduating as the youngest member of the group and reportedly outscoring many of the male candidates. Yet despite her achievements, she was never selected; spaceflight at the time was categorically reserved for men. Undeterred, she forged a trailblazing career as a pilot and flight instructor, logging more than 19,600 flight hours and training some 3,000 pilots. She also became the first woman to work as an aviation safety inspector for the United States Federal Aviation Administration.

In 2021, more than 60 years after her Mercury 13 tests, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos personally invited Funk to join him as an honoured guest aboard the maiden passenger flight of his Blue Origin rocket — a brief, up-and-down suborbital hop from West Texas that lasted approximately 11 minutes. At 82, she became the oldest person ever to reach space, a record later surpassed by actor William Shatner and Ed Dwight, America's first Black astronaut candidate, both aged 90 at the time of their respective flights. She remains the only member of the original Mercury 13 ever to have flown in space. After landing, a jubilant Funk told reporters: