Wally Funk's Race for Space

by Sue Nelson

  There was a reference to her job at the time as a flight instructor at Fort Sill. ‘Never in Fort Sill’s history had a woman been contracted by the government to instruct both male and female pilots.’

  Officials had told Lapsley that Wally was ‘the best flight instructor they have’.

  The final sentence said: ‘In addition to a thorough medical check-up, special tests are given dealing with resistance to stress of various kinds, such as the tilt-table test, bicycle test, master two-step tests and the cold pressure tests of which Miss Funk made an almost above average mark on all tests given her.’

  At the time of that article, only five women had passed the astronaut tests. Wally believed her dream of getting into space was close to being fulfilled. She was cycling sixteen miles each day to get to and from the army base, in order to keep up her fitness. But she knew even then that it would take something extra to realise this dream. ‘It will take faith in mankind and God to get me up,’ she said.

  A few months later, on 21 September, a follow-up article related: ‘No Man in Moon. Stephens Graduate Trains to Be Female Astronaut.’ It was already out of date. Nine days earlier Wally had received the telegram cancelling the programme.

  When we left the storage room, I glanced at my watch. ‘Good grief. We’ve been in there for four hours.’

  Wally said goodbye to the sullen receptionist she’d tried, and failed, to engage in conversation when we’d arrived. ‘Thanks a lot, honey. We’ve been in there for six hours!’

  Those ‘extra’ two hours sure went fast.

  That night, after fond farewells with Loretta, Wally and I shared a hotel room near the airport. I had a 4.30 am start for a return flight to London. Wally’s flight to Dallas was also the next morning, but at a more reasonable time. The television was on, and every few minutes Wally flicked the remote back and forth between several channels. ‘I often watch several movies at once,’ she said. ‘I don’t watch romantic movies though. Too much kissing.’

  I was in bed, in pyjamas, zoned out on my laptop and prepared for an early night. Since Wally usually watched television at a high volume until about 11 pm, the deal was that when I was ready to sleep, she would watch the television in reception before her own bedtime. I heard her unpacking toiletries in the bathroom. She was talking again, but the combination of the air conditioning and the television turned her words into a blur.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ I shouted.

  Wally’s raised voice echoed from the bathroom tiles. ‘I said, have you checked the times of the airport bus in the morning? You don’t wanna miss it.’

  I glanced upwards from my laptop to answer, and was confronted by Wally sat on the toilet. The bathroom door was wide open and there was a mirror on the wardrobe opposite the bathroom entrance. Eyes averted, we continued the conversation. She had a shower. The bathroom door remained open, as did the shower curtain, and I marvelled at her total lack of modesty. Wally was a complete contradiction sometimes. Always conservatively dressed, occasionally demure, and prudish if the conversation veered off into anything remotely sexual, yet Wally was also completely comfortable in her own skin.

  For a brief moment, I watched her bathe and admired her naked body. At seventy-eight, Wally’s constant activity had kept her in shape both physically and mentally. Underneath the baggy cargo pants and shirt, she had the physique and skin of a much younger woman.

  The night before I had encountered another unexpected view of Wally as a younger woman. It resulted from checking the NASA oral history transcript to ascertain the correct timing between Lovelace’s selection call for the tests and her arriving at his clinic. It was, as I’d thought, not days but four weeks. Not an important disparity, as the ageing process often blurred timings and over the years Wally had always been totally transparent with the media. It was just that, like most of us, later stories differed from their earlier versions by small details after being retold hundreds of times.

  Then, as is often the case with the internet, I’d got diverted. It turned out that, in 2001, the Australian band Spiderbait had specifically called their fifth album ‘The Flight of Wally Funk’. Inspired by the female aviator, it included the tracks ‘Inner Ear Infection’, ‘Most Boys Suck’, ‘A.D.D.’ and ‘Arse Huggin’ Pants’. After listening to a couple of the tracks on YouTube – disappointing, but then I’m not a big rock fan – up came the NASA oral history interview among Spiderbait’s list of songs. The interview had been filmed. It was dated 18 July 1999, at the NASA Johnson Space Centre, two years after Wally and I had first met. I pressed play and watched for just under an hour, fascinated by a version of Wally that was thirty years younger. At that stage in her life, I realised, she was only a few years older than me.

  Astonishingly, despite the three decades since it had been filmed, she didn’t look that different. She wore a crisp blue shirt with ‘Wally’ monogrammed on the right and an airplane referencing an air show event on the left. Around her neck I recognised the delicate gold ‘W’ chain from her mother. When she gesticulated and her hands came into the shot, I noticed the same two heavy gold rings, one with the diamond from her mother, on her fingers. Even at sixty, Wally’s hair was as toothpaste-white as her smile. The white hair, as today, reflected her luminous skin. She was truly beautiful.

  More interestingly, her distinctive high-decibel voice was softer, more gentle and, apart from the usual familiar burst of laughter, much quieter. She remained warm and vivacious, but it was as if Wally’s volume had been turned down low. Her overly loud, conversational level today resembled mine if I forgot to take off headphones while editing and answered someone’s question. It made me realise how much age-related hearing loss had affected her tone and presentation over the years.

  I recognised some of the same stories she’d been retelling since the 1960s – the Superman cape she wore when jumping off the barn at four years old, the Merry Widow girdle refashioned into a G suit for the centrifuge at 5G – but the tales had more nuance and, because they were told in a more normal conversational tone, came across as less eccentric. Since her memories were closer to the event itself, more details were intact, too. But what came through most clearly of all was that this was a warm, smart, considered, determined and accomplished woman, a tremendous pilot and a feminist role model. She was full of encouragement for her sex, and advocated for ‘girls’ to study maths, science and engineering and to achieve their dreams if they wanted to go into space. ‘A dog did it, a monkey did it, a man did it, a woman can do it.’

  Watching Wally dry herself brusquely in our motel, I averted my gaze and contemplated how lucky I was to know her, as well as the complex reality of the woman that is Wally Funk. She combined an inability to concentrate in some areas with a complete focus on others: primarily aviation and her goal of becoming an astronaut. This focus had led her to both break barriers and open doors for other women within aviation and the space industry, as well as being an inspiration for others.

  She has spent almost sixty years determined to complete her goal of getting into space. Those sixty years have not been easy for women. Achieving mass representation within many industries has been a slow process, and remains ongoing. Scientist and British astronaut Helen Sharman was almost written out of history when the first British male astronaut flew into space with the European Space Agency, but the first South Korean and the first Iranian in space had both been women, as a part of the Russian space programme. In 2012, almost fifty years after Valentina Tereshkova made her historic flight, China sent Liu Yang, its first woman, into space.

  Women, like men, have given their lives to further our desire to explore beyond Earth. Apart from astronauts Judy Resnik and Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger shuttle accident, Laurel Clark and the first Indian-born woman in space, Dr Kalpana Chawla, were the two women in a crew of seven who died on board Space Shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated while making a landing approach on 1 February 2003.

  Although around 550 people had beco
me astronauts at this point, only around one in ten were female. And, despite the trailblazing heroics of Valentina Tereshkova, fifty of the fifty-nine women who have flown in space were from the United States. The fact that there had been so few female cosmonauts testifies to the continued issue of sexism in the Soviet Union. Only four since 1963. It took until 2013 before the issue was even addressed in public. Scientist and former cosmonaut Yelena Dobrokvashina said that Russian women rarely went into space because Russian men feared that their heroism would be diminished if shared with members of the opposite sex. A year later, in September 2014, Yelena Serova prepared to become the first Russian woman on the International Space Station, and had to fend off questions during a press conference about leaving her daughter and taking care of her hair. She turned the tables and gestured towards her male cosmonaut colleagues. ‘Aren’t you interested in the hairstyles of my colleagues?’

  NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg got so fed up of being asked how she washed her long blonde hair on the ISS that she eventually took control and made a much-viewed video showing how it was done. But there has been progress. In September 2014, India successfully placed its Mars Orbiter Spacecraft into orbit around the red planet. A photograph of the control room made even more impact around the world. It showed a group of space engineers celebrating the mission’s success. Most of these engineers were women dressed in colourful saris. For many, that image was a visual redefining the once traditional all-male preserve of mission control rooms. At several space agencies now, there are women flight directors, engineers, robotics experts, scientists and doctors.

  But while only around sixty women have gone into space until now, the pool of countries that they are from is even smaller – just ten: the UK, France, Italy, Canada, the USA, China, Japan, India, Russia and South Korea. Once commercial spaceflights are up and running, the number of women who have gone into space will increase dramatically, and their nationalities will diversify. It may be a business for the space tourism entrepreneurs, but for women it is also a highly visible opportunity to claim their rightful place alongside men in space. Yet again, Wally will be breaking boundaries.

  There are few who deserve a spaceflight more than Wally, except maybe Jerrie Cobb who, by being the first woman aviator to pass the astronaut tests in 1959, made the Mercury 13 and Wally’s space ambitions possible in the first place. But at eighty-six, Cobb’s opportunity has likely passed. Meanwhile, Wally has been saving and preparing to become an astronaut by studying space travel and taking every opportunity available through the media, from a zero-G flight or a week’s training alongside cosmonauts, to get a little closer to realising her dream.

  What if ill-health prevents her from going up? It was a question I’d hesitated to ask. I hadn’t wanted, like her, to even consider the possibility. ‘I wanna go, I wanna go,’ she said. ‘I’m in great health, and I take vitamins and I keep going 100 miles per hour every day. One woman said the other day you walk too fast. No. I’m gonna go. There’s no doubt about it. I’m in perfect health. The only tablets I take are vitamins.’

  Wally does her exercises each morning, and moves at a pace that often causes me to canter to keep up. But even the longevity of her legendary fitness sometimes gives Wally cause for concern. ‘I put a ladder against the fence at the back of my yard and climbed over it the other day to clean it up,’ she said.

  ‘But something happened that I hadn’t felt in the last year. It was hard for me to swing my leg over my fence. I had to get a guy to help me hold my butt up.’

  Not bad for a seventy-eight-year-old. ‘I will fly until I’m ninety-one,’ she said laughing. ‘After that I probably won’t pass the physical. I just wish I was flying ten hours a week. I’m only getting two hours every other week at the moment. I go up to 5,000 feet, doing stalls, and I take one guy in his Cessna 182 and we can do a loop.’

  There is no doubt that Wally is ready to become an astronaut. It’s why she keeps so fit. It is also fortunate for her that commercial space flights are now on offer, because the career path for would-be astronauts has become far more competitive and demanding over the decades. Today’s near-superhuman requirements would probably squeeze out talented pilots like Wally – even those, again like her, who had reached an Olympic standard of athleticism.

  Nowadays astronauts have multiple degrees, Masters or PhDs – usually in physics, medicine, aerospace or engineering – and the ability to speak several languages. By today’s standards, it is highly likely that not all of the Mercury 7 men would meet the criteria to fly into space. Although, by yesterday’s standards, those harsh physical tests might have poleaxed a few modern astronauts’ careers too.

  But back in the 1960s, talented pilots in peak physical and mental health made great astronaut candidates, able to handle the conditions and requirements they met with at the time. Wally Funk, and the rest of the Mercury 13 female pilots, had the right stuff. Wally was – and is – exceptional. This remarkable woman was denied her destiny as one of the first women in space. But what a life she has had while fighting to right a wrong. Wally has shown a generation of women that we could – and can – do space travel and, whether behind the scenes or in the pilot’s seat of a spaceplane, that the history of space consists of a number of immensely brave women who were ready to strap themselves in on top of a rocket to explore the unknown. Women have always aimed high and, eventually, women reach those heights – even if it must have sometimes felt as if the world wanted to punish them for their ambition.

  Wally is now approaching eighty. This is a race against time. Time that history owes her. Wally’s whole life has been heading towards those final moments when she will launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico and enjoy those precious few minutes in space. Minutes that will feel like a lifetime. Minutes that will achieve the lifetime ambition of one truly extraordinary woman.

  We rarely discussed her age, but it was often there, unspoken in the background. She told me over dinner once, out of the blue, that she had booked her spot at the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, California. That was my chance. Is there anything in her life she would have done differently? ‘Absolutely not,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ve loved everything I’ve done, sweetheart. I wish I was born twenty years later so I could have been in the military and gone into space. That’s what I wish. Now I can’t do anything but support space or lecture in schools about STEM. But honey, I wouldn’t change my life for one minute.’

  When I left the motel room in darkness the following morning, Wally was asleep. Seeing this woman, who is normally in constant motion, calm and lying still was a strange sight. It felt as if she was suspended, like Schrödinger’s cat, in a quantum state where anything was possible. A state where dreams of space travel could come true.

  Sources and Further Reading

  There are several books published about the Mercury 13. I started two of them, as they were extremely useful for cross-referencing and checking dates, but then became worried that their tales about Wally would influence my own experience of her, and so deliberately put them on hold until after the writing for this book was finished. Those books are: The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, by Martha Ackmann (Random House, 2003) and Right Stuff Wrong Sex by Margaret A. Weitekamp (Johns Hopkins, 2004). There is also Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race by Stephanie Nolen (Basic Books, 2004), and Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Jane Addams Honor (Candlewick, 2009).

  Obviously, I’m not going to reveal which one Wally was unhappy about. But it’s fair to say that her reasons were personal and, for what it’s worth, from what I have read of that particular book so far, it’s excellent. Although Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff (Jonathan Cape, 1980) was about the Mercury men rather than the women, it is a fantastic read about the space race that took place from the 1950s onwards. The tests that the men endured were exactly the same as the
Mercury 13 women took, under the same medical supervision of Dr Lovelace. So there is a connection. Just think of the women when you read it. The film version, made in 1983, is definitely worth watching, too. Somehow seeing the indignity of those tests being reenacted, makes it all the more real and jaw-clenching.

  Any quotes I have used from newspapers or magazines have been referenced with dates and titles along the way. Any space facts and figures have been checked using NASA or ESA, or both.

  There’s a good summary of the Woman in Space programme written by a relative of Dr Don Kilgore (who worked at the Lovelace Clinic). It’s called A Forgotten Moment in Physiology: The Lovelace Woman in Space Program (1960–62) by Kathy L. Ryan, Jack A. Loeppky and Donald E. Kilgore Jr. (Adv Physiol Educ 33: 157–164, June, 2009). If you have a specific interest in New Mexico’s space history, you can hunt out Loretta Hall’s Out of This World: New Mexico’s Contributions to Space Travel (Rio Grande Books, 2011). If you want to inspire younger women (and men) by what women have done in the past, then I’d recommend A Galaxy of Her Own: Amazing Stories of Women in Space by Libby Jackson (Century, 2017).

  Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly (William Collins, 2013) does not cover female astronauts or aviators, but it is an excellent book and a great example of women who made a difference and persisted in what was then the male-dominated environment of space travel.

  I have lived with stories of the Mercury 13 for over twenty years now. The result in print form is part travelogue, part biography and part history of women in space. The main source for this book is my travels with Wally Funk, of course, and resulted from multiple interviews and recordings between 1997 and 2017. Along the way, I double-checked dates and facts, helped by a number of original documents that Wally has stored either in Dallas or Albuquerque. During this period of time I also interviewed Mercury 13 members Jerri Truhill, Sarah Ratley and Irene Leverton, legendary NASA flight director Chris Kraft and Dr Don Kilgore from the Lovelace Clinic. Most of the quotations from astronauts and scientists are also taken from first-hand interviews. Having original source material on audio was a huge help, while watching Wally’s 1999 oral history interview with NASA on YouTube is a fascinating step back in time, even if it’s not the full Wally experience volume-wise, as she talks a lot louder now.