UKH

https://news.sky.com/story/wally-funk-woman-82-gets-chance-to-go-into-space...

Heart warming story for a Friday.

She looks very spritely for an 82 year old. 

"Nothing has ever gotten in my way," she added.

"They said, 'Well, you're a girl, you can't do that'. I said, 'Guess what, doesn't matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it' and I like to do things that nobody has ever done."

"Ms Funk was the youngest of 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in a programme which sent the first Americans into space in 1961-1963"

"But the women, dubbed the Mercury 13, including Ms Funk, who was then a 21-year-old pilot, were denied the chance to become astronauts themselves because of their gender as all of NASA's astronauts were male military test pilots."

Amazing woman .

AP

....and Bezos proves how much of a genius he is. Previously I thought that maybe a high speed fireball conclusion might not be such a bad thing but now not so much.

Indeed.  It even makes me think slightly better of Bezos (whilst hoping that wasn't his main motivation).

On the other hand, my opinion of Branson hasn't been improved at all by his pathetic one-upmanship.   

Thank you, I heard her being interviewed on the radio a few years ago (she had a book coming out) and had forgotten her name. Her piloting escapades were outstanding. 

Not to belittle the lady but wasn't 21 a little too young to have had the necessary experience to have flown in an experimental spacecraft like Mercury? I think the ones that flew in the first three programmes were all quite mature (30s into 40s by the time Apollo was up and under way).

25-40 was the recruitment age range but at 21 her credentials were strong enough to gain admittance 

Just skimmed her Wikipedia entry and she only became a professional pilot at 20. No military or test pilot experience so, although gender was probably at the heart of things, she had very little to offer compared to the likes of Armstrong.

I didn’t claim otherwise. 

The X-15 last flew in 1968, and it was another 35 years before anything else flew in that envelope, when Scaled Composites flew SpaceShipOne.  I'm happy to see Virgin Galactic keeping that envelope open, there's something sad about people giving up and parts of the envelope closing down with capability regressing even as technology progresses.  Branson's achievement is pretty insignificant in terms of orbital space flight, and I can't see it catching up to VTVL rockets in any meaningful way, but it's genuinely expanding the envelope of what aircraft can do which is a notable achievement IMO.  

It's just rather sad watching Branson and Bezos compete for a very weak second prize as SpaceX hope to launch their giant, field-redefining, fully reusable orbital craft in July (stated by Gwynne Shotwell who is not as fanciful with timelines as Musk).  

Blue have got a path to orbit - Eric Berger's take on their journey to date is pretty blunt - https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/so-what-really-happened-with-blue-o... - can they recover some of the early dynamism?

On the space front, one casualty of the pandemic was Bigelow.  Had a really interesting natter with someone who visited his base a few years back.