‘Mercury 13’ included Flying Aggie Funk
Thirteen female pilots aced the same tests as the men who became NASA’s first astronauts, but were deemed unfit for space flight because they were women.
“Mercury 13,” a new Netflix documentary directed by David Sington and Heather Walsh, tells the story of the women who dreamed of becoming astronauts two decades before Sally Ride took that step.
The oldest candidate, Jane Hart, was a 41-year-old mother of eight and the wife of U.S. Sen. Philip Hart of Michigan.
Wally Funk, a flight instructor and recent graduate of Oklahoma State University, was the youngest.
“I love flying, honey. It’s been my life since I was 1 year old,” Funk said. It was a DC-3 airliner that grabbed her attention during a visit to the airport in Taos, New Mexico, where she was born and raised.
“I knew exactly what I wanted to do as a youngster,” Funk said. She took her first airplane ride at 13 and earned her private pilot’s license at 16.
She chose OSU because of the Flying Aggies flight team, which she noticed won many competitions.
Funk said they didn’t discriminate against women, but took any student who was good enough for the program.
“I got into the flight program and just went wild and had the best time,” she said.
After graduating in 1960, all she wanted to do was fly.
“I wanted to be in the military. They weren’t ready for me,” said Funk, who later became the military’s first female civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill.
Funk said Jerrie Cobb, who lived in Ponca City, told her researchers were testing women’s capabilities for spaceflight at a clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
She, in turn, told Gene Nora Stumbough, now Jessen, a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma, during a competition.
All three aviators passed the tests and became members of the Mercury 13, as they came to be known. Because women generally are smaller and lighter than men, scientists thought they might make good candidates for space flight. Starting in 1960, Dr. William Randolph Lovelace invited accomplished female pilots to undergo the physical testing regimen that he had developed to help select NASA’s first astronauts. The program was funded privately.
When the space agency found out Lovelace planned to continue testing and training the 13 women in Pensacola, Florida, the program was shut down. The women argued before Congress in 1962, claiming sexual discrimination. None of them ever went into space.
Funk, who lives in Roanoke, Texas, and still works as a flight instructor, said some of the women were terribly upset. “It didn’t bother me a bit,” she said.
Funk saw it as another interesting chapter in her life and went on a three-year world tour instead. She traveled in a Volkswagen camper through the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
“I went to Syria and other countries you can’t get into today,” she said.
Funk said she has taught more than 3,000 people to fly, and was the first woman to be a Federal Aviation Administration inspector and a National Transportation Safety Board investigator.
She gives her age as 45, because that’s how old she feels.
Funk attributes her energy, stamina and positive attitude to being born at a high attitude. A doctor once told her such people go “higher, faster, longer.”
That sounds like Wally Funk.