Funk, now based in Roanoke, Texas, has prepared for this moment for nearly four decades.
She flies almost daily. Since 1960 she has been a flight instructor at aviation schools throughout the country. She now holds the title of chief pilot and is qualified to fly more than 30 types of planes including the Piper, Cessna, DC-3, Stearman, AT-6, Waco, and Navion. Shes participated in more than 10 air races, and placed, and she lectured worldwide on aviation. In 1974 she was the first woman to become an accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.
Women In Space?
Funk has also trained for space flight. Three years ago she experienced zero-gravity at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.
Funk's longtime hope was that the Mercury 13 program might find a new incarnation.
Originally the NASA astronaut program was restricted to men—the Mercury Seven. But after the Soviets expanded their astronaut corps to include women, NASA quietly followed suit with the Mercury 13.
The women were given exactly the same tests as the men had received just a little over a year earlier. "We were the best kept secret in the United States," Funk says.
Funk grew up as a self-confessed tomboy in Taos, New Mexico. An expert markswoman and skier, she loved the outdoors—nearly as much as airplanes. On her 16th birthday she got her pilot's license. By 20, she was the chief flight instructor for the army in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
In 1960, when Funk read in Life magazine that NASA would be training female astronauts, she hastened to write to Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II, then NASA's director of space medicine, who had tested John Glen and the rest of the Mercury 7 men.
"He immediately wrote back and said 'We want you. But you're going to have to have permission from your parents at 21,'" says Funk.
Funk's mother avidly backed her daughter's passion for flight and drove her to Albuquerque for a weeklong battery of tests.
"Everything you saw in 'The Right Stuff,' that's what we did," Funk recalls. "We did a lot of tests that they don't have to do today."
The Right Stuff
In a high G-force test there were no suits designed for women. Funk improvised. "I asked my mother for a merry widow, so that I could keep the blood up in my head when you're going round and round and round at 5-Gs," Funk says. "They never blacked me out. I never did faint."
The women scored high in the tests, often surpassing the men. "Their results were so astonishing that, at the time, I didn't see how NASA could turn them down," says Donald Kilgore, who was an ear, nose and throat doctor at the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1961 and tested the women.
"All of the Mercury women were extraordinary," says Kilgore. Their performances on the tests equaled or in some cases surpassed the men of the Mercury 7. "Women were also lighter, consumed less food and oxygen and that's important when you consider it takes 1,000 pounds of thrust for every pound of payload."
Lovelace had planned to take his Mercury 13 down to Pensacola, Florida, to get the women flight experience on fighter jets when he was told by NASA to stop the program—that, in effect, the nation wasn't ready for female astronauts.
"(It was) terrible," Funk says. "I mean, they never gave us a chance to prove ourselves. We were 20 years ahead of Sally Ride and 30 years ahead of Eileen Collins."
Funk's focus is on today and the Solaris X. Tests of the rocket engine are planned for September 2003. Within 18 months, says Funk, she could be bound on her maiden sub-orbital flight. With 16,800 hours in the air, she's determined to win the prize.
"I plan to keep flying until I'm 90," Funk says. "I'm in top physical condition and I don't have any glitches."
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