Wally Funk, the last surviving member of the Mercury 13 and the oldest woman to reach space, died at 87. Born in 1939 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Funk built an aviation career defined by firsts: first female flight instructor at a U.S. military base, first woman to earn an FAA flight inspector rating, and first female air safety investigator for the NTSB. She served as chief pilot at five aviation schools, training thousands of pilots across every major rating.

Funk's path to space was delayed six decades. In 1961, she passed the same physiological and psychological tests as NASA's Mercury 7 astronauts as part of the privately funded First Lady Astronaut Trainees program, but the agency never flew women. She finally launched on Blue Origin NS-16 in July 2021 at age 82, setting a Guinness World Record. Her 2020 memoir, *Higher, Faster, Longer*, documented the wait.

Posthumous honors include induction into the International Space Hall of Fame later this year, joining her 2024 Texas Aviation Hall of Fame entry and the 2022 Michael Collins Trophy for Lifetime Achievement. Funk outlived every Mercury 13 peer and all seven original NASA astronauts.

Her persistence forced the industry to confront its exclusion of women not through rhetoric but through accumulated competence — thousands of students trained, hundreds of accidents investigated, and a suborbital flight that proved capability knows no expiration date.