With this video published on social media, Jeff Bezos has unveiled another member of the crew who, on July 10th, will fly for a few minutes in space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft, the aerospace company led by the founder of Amazon. This is Wally Funk, 82, one of the participants in NASA’s “Mercury 13” program in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, NASA had selected and trained a group of thirteen women with the idea of making them participate in space programs, at a time when human beings began their flights among the stars (the first, in 1961, was the Russian Yuri Gagarin). These women, in the end, were never actually enlisted.
Funk was an iconic aviator of the last century. When NASA officially allowed women to apply as astronauts in 1976, Funk tried to apply three times without success. Now he will finally have a chance. Bezos’ brother and another passenger who bought a ticket during an auction for about 28 million dollars will also fly on the same spacecraft on 20 July.