Source #Economist: Wally Funk, an aviator who insisted on going into space, died on July 8th at the age of 87. * **Early Life & Defiance**: From a young age, Funk rejected traditional expectations for girls (such as home economics), preferring car mechanics, hunting, and building things. She earned her pilot’s license at 17, won races, and excelled at aviation. * **Aviation Career**: She worked as the first woman to inspect planes for the Federal Aviation Administration, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (inspecting plane crashes), and logged 19,600 flight hours while teaching 3,000 people to fly. * **The Space Program & Mercury 13**: In 1960, Dr. William Randolph Lovelace set up a private program to test women for spaceflight, and Funk joined the group known as the Mercury 13. Although she passed the rigorous tests better than the men, the program was canceled because NASA required all-male air-force jet pilots. * **Achieving Spaceflight**: Decades later, at age 82, she finally went to space as a guest on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin craft on July 20th, 2021, becoming the oldest person to venture into space at that time for a 10-minute flight.## ConclusionWally Funk lived a life defined by relentless determination, breaking barriers in a male-dominated field of aviation and enduring lifelong exclusion from NASA’s astronaut corps. Despite setbacks and institutional hurdles, her unyielding passion for flight sustained her for decades until she ultimately achieved her lifelong dream of reaching the stars in her eighties.