WASHINGTON: Sixty years after joining a private program with the hope that one day becomes an astronaut, US pilot Wally Funk will finally see his dream of becoming a reality at the age of 82.
On Thursday, the founder of Amazon billionaire, Jeft Bezos invited him to join the July 20 company launch company Blue.
Flights will not only make it the oldest person who has traveled into space, but also a symbol of walking, breathing from rewards of courage and perseverance.
“I like to do things that anyone has never done,” he said in the video posted on Instagram by Bezos.
Funk grow in the western United States in Taos, New Mexico.
As a child, he was excited about flights and took his first flight lesson at the age of nine years.
In high school, he is prohibited from taking mechanics, the subject is provided for boys.
These rules do not prevent it from getting pilot licenses and graduating from Oklahoma State University, known as the flight program.
Now he has recorded 19,600 hours of flight time.
In the early 1960s, he joined a personally funded innovative flight program called Mercury 13 which placed women through training and tests that were the same as the Astronaut of men who underwent the official NASA program.
A doctor who helped develop a training test, William Randolph Lovelace, decided to allow women to try it in his personal clinic to see if they could also graduate.
13 women became mercury 13 with Funk became the youngest among them.
“They tested us for our extreme,” he remembered in the interview in 1999 with NASA.
Water is injected into his ear to induce dizziness.
He must swallow a rubber tube.
But “it will make me one step closer to space, and here I want to go.” For one trial, Funk is locked in a dark tank with perfect sound insulation, filled with water stored at the right body temperature so that all feelings and sensations are lost.
“I stood on my back, floating in the water, without being able to use my five senses.
I just had to stay there lying down”, he said.
He broke the record by staying inside for 10 hours and 35 minutes.
In the end, “they told me that I had done a job better and faster than any man,” he recalled during the Thursday video statement.
But this program was removed after being rejected by NASA and the first American woman did not go into space until 1983.
“It was rather interesting, the fact that we could do it, and they would not let us.
A dog did.
A monkey did it.
A man did it .
Women can also do it, “he said in 1999.
Wally Funk was applied to become an astronaut on four occasions.
He was rejected at all times.
One of the reasons given is that he did not have a technical degree and had not completed the flight program on a military fighter jet that was impossible to ask a woman at the time.
But Funk has never lacked ambition: He became the first female inspector of the American Flight Agency, FAA, then the first female researcher for American agents responsible for Aeronautics (NTSB) disaster.
He handled more than 450 accidents by his retirement in 1984 and taught 3,000 people to fly.
And he never gave up his dream of leaving gravity behind and flew between the stars.
When asked about his biggest achievement in 1999, Funk replied: “If I can go into space, that’s what will happen.”