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Wally Funk smiles during a post launch briefing where passengers described their flight experience from the spaceport near Van Horn, Texas, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Funk, a “beloved Grapevine resident,” died Wednesday at the age of 87, the city announced. (Tony Gutierrez | AP)

Wally Funk, a North Texas aviation pioneer and the oldest person to ever go to space, has died. She was 87.

The city of Grapevine announced her death Thursday, calling her a “global symbol of determination, perseverance and excellence.”

Funk, born in 1939, was known for breaking gender barriers for women in aviation. She earned her pilot’s license at 17.

She was one of 13 women selected the First Lady Astronaut Trainees program — also known as Mercury 13 — passing the same physical and mental tests as NASA’s astronauts, though the agency did not allow women to become astronauts at the time.

“I’m not going to sit back and pine over anything,” Funk said in a Storycorps interview with one of her flight students, Mary Holsenbeck. “I applied to NASA four times. And finally, they said, ‘Wally, we’re sorry. But you don’t have an engineering degree. I said, ‘well, I’ll get one.

“So I never let anything stop me.”

In this 2019 photo made available by NASA, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk visits the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio. Funk was the only member of the elite group of women to ever travel to space. (AP | NASA)

Funk went on to have a decades-long career in aviation: According to the city of Grapevine, she was one of the first female flight instructors at Fort Still, Oklahoma, and the first woman inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration. She also trained more than 3,000 pilots as a flight instructor.

“Her main passion, the things she’d rather do than breathe and eat, was to fly, and that’s just who she was,” Grapevine City Council member Duff O’Dell, a friend of Funk’s, told KERA. “She was a flyer, and she loved airplanes and being up in the sky more than anything in the world. “

In 2021, at the age of 82, Funk became the oldest person to go to space, joining the crew of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Shepard NS-16 mission. She was the only member of Mercury 13 to make it to space.

In 2024, she was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame .

“Wally was a true force of nature, and I mean that in every sense of the word,” O’Dell said. “She just was one of the most dynamic, interesting, there’s just not enough great adjectives to use to describe the exuberance that was Wally Funk.”

Avery Escamilla-Wendell is KERA’s news intern. Got a tip? Email Avery at aescamillawendell@kera.org . You can follow heron Instagram @by_avery_escamilla.

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