Story at a glance:
- Wally Funk took a postcard with her on her historic trip to space.
- ”I felt great,” Funk said.
- Funk had originally trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s but never got a chance to fly.
Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard rocket went into space on Tuesday, and 82-year-old Wally Funk carried a postcard of herself during her flight into space.
The postcard features Funk standing in front of the American flag, Business Insider reported.
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“That is what is going to be on the window when I go up,” Funk told Insider. “I’m going to take a picture with it with the earth behind me.”
She is now the oldest U.S. astronaut to journey to space, albeit, the edge of space, breaking the previous holder of that recognition, John Glenn’s record of 1998.
“I saw darkness, I thought I was going to see the world, but we weren’t quite high enough,” she said during a post-launch news conference Tuesday, NBC News reported. “And I felt great. I felt like I was just lying down, just lying down — and I was going into space.”
Funk revisited the idea of going to space nearly six decades after she trained for it in the 1960s alongside a group of female aviators called the Mercury 13.
She was on track to become one of the first females to be launched into space, but because she was a woman, NASA’s astronaut corps was not open to the prospect of letting a woman fly at that time, especially someone who was under the required age of 24.
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Published on Jul 20,2021