It's never too late to make a dream come true
Record temperatures scorch Earth, but a select few are escaping to space
Like much of western North America, Edmonton has had unpleasantly hot weather with very little rain. The temperature has been as high as 39 C, with dismal consequences for farmers' crops and livestock. And many old people have whined incessantly about the heat, not appreciating that the more they complained, the worse they felt about it (the older I get, the more impressed I have become with the power of our brain, and with the way our attitude can affect our quality of life). Most recently, we haven't seen the sun for days because the sky is solidly grey from forest fire smoke.
Me, I just lived with it. For I have a very simple philosophy: if I cannot affect an outcome, I don't care and just live with whatever. So I just drank more water than usual, watered my gardens twice rather than once a day, and otherwise carried on as usual.
Fortunately, our high was nowhere near 49.6 C, the new all-time Canadian record set in Lytton, B.C., before that town of 250, two-thirds of the way northeast of Vancouver to Kamloops, burned to the ground in a sudden and rapidly spreading wildfire. And it certainly was far more tolerable than the 53 C in Phoenix and Salt Lake City a few days earlier.
On July 20, Jeff Bezos went on a “suborbital” space flight (i.e. one that does not go into orbit but just higher than 100 km above sea level, and twice the height that entitles those in the U.S. military and NASA to wear astronaut wings). After a 10 minute ride, he successfully returned to Earth.
Bezos's space vehicle is named New Shepard, after Alan Shepard, who in 1961 was the second man and first American in space. He was all by himself in Freedom 7 for 15-and-a-half minutes and rose to a height of 187 km. In 1971, Shepard was part of a threeman Apollo 14 crew that walked on the moon.
New Shepard was made by Bezos's space flight company, Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000 and which now employs 3,500 people — and it is supposedly costing him US$1 billion a year.
On this occasion, New Shepard carried passengers for the first time: Bezos; his younger brother Mark; and Wally Funk, an air-industry pioneer who at auction bid US$28 million for the third passenger spot.
And here it gets interesting. Wally's full name is Mary Wallace Funk and she is 82. She had her first flying lesson at age nine and was a licensed pilot before she was old enough to vote. This trip fulfilled a dream she has harboured for 61 years.
For at age 21 she was the youngest of 25 women, each with more than 2,000 hours of flying time under her belt, selected by Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II for a Mercury 13-like testing program to validate women's suitability for space flight.
She performed so well that in some tests she outscored U.S. Marine Corps pilot John Glenn, who three years later became the third American in space and the first to circle Earth (three times) aboard Friendship 7. He later told the House Space Committee: “The fact ... women are not in this (space) field is a fact of our social order.”
When NASA finally started accepting female astronauts in the latter 1970s, Funk applied several times, but, at age 40, was ruled out as “too old.” On the other hand, when Glenn retired from the Marine Corps and NASA in 1965 after 24 years' service, he was elected, on his second try, to the U.S. Senate in 1974. He served there until 1999, after having set a record, the year before at age 77, as the oldest person in space.
Meanwhile, Funk had a career in the air industry, during which she set many firsts, starting at age 21 when she was the first female civilian pilot instructor teaching U.S. army personnel at Fort Sill. Now at 82, twice what NASA rejected as “too old,” she has set two new firsts: she's both the oldest person and the oldest woman to travel in space. And she has the added satisfaction of replacing a male, Glenn, as the oldest-ever space traveller.
So she has set an example for all octogenarians by never letting her dreams die and never giving up, just as George H.W. Bush did for octogenarian males. For at
75, he started celebrating every fifth birthday by skydiving — the last time at 90 when, on Earth in a wheelchair, he had to do so “tethered to a keeper” to help him land. He died seven months before he turned 95.
There now seems to be a billionaires' space race underway. On July 1, Virgin Galactic announced that Richard Branson would go into space aboard its White Knight Two space vehicle (along with several of its technical people but no paying passengers). And he did make headlines for successfully going. Virgin Galactic has been selling space travel tickets for years, with one person known to have paid US$200,000 in 2010 to be the
No. 610 ticket holder on the space-trip waiting list.
Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is Elon Musk's Falcon 9 Spacex vehicle that will, in due course, take passengers on orbital space flights. In the years to come, this may well become a pastime for the idle rich, competing for high placements in the space flight wait list rankings.