Jeff Bezos will take an 82-year-old woman on the first manned flight of his space company Blue Origin later this month. Wally Funk becomes the oldest person ever to go into space.
The Blue Origin rocket New Shepard will be launched on July 20 in Texas to an altitude of more than 100 kilometers. The occupants are weightless there for a few minutes. Then the craft sinks back into the atmosphere to land again on Earth. Bezos’ brother Mark also goes along, as does the winner of an auction that secured a spot in the rocket for $ 28 million (more than 23 million euros).
Wally Funk already had plans to go into space in the 1960s. She participated in the Woman in Space program, which prepared women for careers as astronauts. She was part of the “Mercury 13,” thirteen American women who successfully underwent the same NASA screening as astronauts selected by the space agency. However, none of these women ever went into space.