Little girls can be fearless. Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk was one of them. At five, armed with a Superman cape and a dream, she bounded from the roof of her family’s barn in New Mexico into a haystack.
Most children grow out of their dreams of being an astronaut. Funk never did. She spent the rest of her life doing a more elaborate version of the same thing: trying to get off the ground. Her death this month came just five years after she finally touched the sky.
It was a long and winding trajectory. In 1960, a physician named William Randolph Lovelace II — the same man who had screened NASA’s male astronauts — quietly put a group of women pilots through the identical testing regime. They were the Mercury 13. Funk, at twenty-one, was the youngest of the thirteen who passed. In the sensory-deprivation tank — floating in water warmed to her own body temperature — most of the men tapped out after about three hours. Funk stayed under for ten hours and thirty-five minutes. She napped. The researchers eventually decided she’d made her point and fished her out. On several tests she outscored John Glenn, soon to be the first American to orbit the Earth. The historian Margaret Weitekamp later summed it up in four words: “Right stuff, wrong sex.”
By every measure anyone could devise — every needle, every tank, every stopwatch — Funk was cleared to fly. Then the unsanctioned program was canceled, not with a hearing but a telegram. When Congress did eventually hold hearings, the men who had flown testified that the absence of women from spaceflight was, as Glenn put it, “a fact of our social order.” One that “may be undesirable,” he allowed, but a fact.
So she waited. “The old-boy network,” Funk said, “didn’t want us.” She applied to NASA four times, and four times was turned down — the last time for want of an engineering degree. “Well, I’ll get one,” she said. Airlines refused her too; one explained, apparently in earnest, that it had nowhere for a woman to use the bathroom. In 1995 she stood at the launchpad and watched Eileen Collins fly the thing she had trained for.
Funk was a woman of remarkable grit. Drinking a pint of radioactive water will do that for you. But there comes a time when gravity takes its toll on us all, and even she said, “I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up.” In her seventies she put $200,000 down for a seat with Virgin Galactic, and was still in line when Sir Richard Branson himself went up. Sixty years. Still circling.
By 2021, she’d stopped expecting it. Then Jeff Bezos called.
Blue Origin’s first crewed flight had a spare seat, and it had her name on it. There was no test to pass this time; the woman who had passed every test was simply invited.
From astronauts to agrarian realities, Jesus once told a story about a landowner who hired workers for his vineyard — some at dawn, others at the eleventh hour, an hour before quitting time. When the whistle blew, he paid them all the same. The ones who had sweated through the whole day were, understandably, furious. The owner’s reply is one of the strangest lines in the Gospels: “Are you envious because I am generous?”
Even further back, the prophet Isaiah promised that “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles.” But what arrived, sixty years late, wasn’t the reward for waiting. It was a gift she’d merely stayed alive long enough to receive.
None of which means the striving was wasted. She flew for another sixty years, taught three thousand people to do the same, and would have laughed at anyone who called her a passive recipient of anything. Grit and grace aren’t enemies. It’s just that only one of them ever opened the door — and it wasn’t the one she’d spent her life pushing against.
Most of us are circling something. Not the celestial realms, perhaps, but a marriage repaired, a child returned, a vocation finally recognized, a prayer that’s there but never really articulated anymore. And most of us handle the wait the way Funk did: we retake the tests. We add the qualification, put the deposit down, stay close to the launchpad. Doesn’t the door open for whoever pushes hardest? The vineyard owner’s question is aimed at that instinct we have. But what if the call, when it comes, comes not because you finally proved enough, but because someone had a seat with your name on it all along?
At five she leapt off a barn roof and the haystack caught her. At eighty-two the sky finally did. She’d been cleared to fly since 1961. It turns out she was only ever waiting for clearance to land.
