Oldest person in space (female)

The oldest person to go to space Wally Funk (USA, b. February 1, 1939). She was 82 years 169 days old when she made a suborbital spaceflight on the Blue Origin NS-16 mission, which took off from near Van Horn, Texas, USA, on July 20, 2021.

Wally Funk was obsessed with flying from a young age. At 16, she transferred from her local high school to Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where there was an active women's flying club. She earned her pilot's license there before heading to Oklahoma State University, which was known for having the best pilot training program in the US. By the time she graduated in 1960, Funk had thousands of hours of flying time and was type-rated for everything from gliders to seaplanes.

It was not easy for a woman to find work in the aviation industry of the 1960s, however. Commercial airlines would not hire women pilots, and the US Air Force did not accept women either. Funk ended up taking a job as a civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where she taught male Air Force recruits how to fly.

It was during this time that she learned of the so-called "Mercury 13" program, a privately-funded initiative that would subject a group of 25 women pilots to the same gruelling physical and mental tests that the "Mercury 7" group of male astronauts went through. Wally was one of the 13 women that passed these tests, scoring higher than the male candidates in several areas.

While the success of the program and the publicity it garnered were enough to force Congress to hold hearings on the possibility of women astronauts, it was not enough to actually get the “Mercury 13” through the door. After various figures involved in the space program lined up to shoot down the idea of women astronauts, further training of the "Mercury 13" candidates was discontinued, and these highly capable women returned to their lives.

For Funk, that meant figuring out how she could carve out a place for herself in the exclusively male aviation industry. After almost a decade of working as a flight instructor and unsuccessfully applying for work at airlines, Funk joined the Federal Aviation Administration as a flight inspector. She later worked as an air crash investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board and managed academic flight training programs.

By flying into space at the age of 82, Funk surpassed a record set in 1998 by the late Mercury 7 astronaut John Glenn, who joined the crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-95 at 77 years of age. She broke the record almost exactly 60 years after the congressional hearing at which John Glenn testified, "The fact that women are not in this field [spaceflight] is a fact of our social order."