Wally Funk is going to space! I saw the story last night on CNN and about fell out of my chair. Jeff Bezos will be taking her along on the first manned – should we say populated? – flight of New Shepard, his new private-sector spaceship. It will happen on July 20, just a couple of weeks from now. At 82, she will be the oldest person ever to fly in space.
Back in the early sixties, the glorious Kennedy years, the first days of the space race, when I was a kid in Albuquerque, there was a year or two when the most famous, instantly recognizable celebrities in the world were “The Mercury Seven,” the astronauts being trained for America’s first space flights.
People who forget the Cold War context can have a hard time understanding the outsized importance that attached to those early flights. The bad Russians had busted our nuclear monopoly and blockaded Berlin and infiltrated Cuba. They had beaten us into near space with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and seemed to have the edge in H-bomb development, reporting surreal kilotonnage after every blast. The space race was supposed to be our chance both to “catch up” with the Soviets and to transform the terms of the competition. Kennedy’s brash 1962 promise to go to the moon within the decade felt like deliverance, at least to nuclear age worry warts like me. A gentleman’s bet in place of a nuclear showdown, Tom Swift in place of Nagasaki and the Bikini Atoll. How could you beat that?
So the early space program was no sober investment in emerging technology. It was half propaganda stunt, half crazed hobbyist adventure, half cosmic allegory, and one hundred percent last-ditch rescue mission. The real purpose, widely understood though unstated, was to save the world from nuclear holocaust, by providing this surprisingly gentle alternative.
The Mercury Seven, those pure warriors who were going to save us all, were hugely famous even before their names were known. Every stage of their selection and training got adoring press, and their first flights, at least, usurped programming on all three networks for minute-by-minute coverage. I remember studying an issue of The Weekly Reader, in fifth grade I think, that let us “Meet the Astronauts” long before their mission assignments were even known. A year or two later, the audio from NBC’s coverage of John Glenn’s first orbital flight was piped in through the ancient PA system over the teacher’s desk, and we listened to hour after hour of it as we sat at our desks, working math problems in our spiral notebooks.
In one of the funniest books you will ever read, The Right Stuff (1979), Tom Wolfe portrays the Mercury Program with relentless but exquisitely targeted sarcasm. The astronauts, he never lets us forget, were less pilots than passengers, mainly along for the ride while all the essential decisions took place at Ground Control. Real test pilots, genuine pressure performers like Chuck Yeager (who declined his invitation to the program), tended to sneer at the Mercury cohort, comparing them to Ham, the chimp who appeared beaming on the cover of Life after serving as test animal extraordinaire on one of the last unmanned flights.
But the story NASA and Kennedy were telling required that the astronauts be seen as autonomous heroes, serenely possessed of that macho “stuff” Wolfe writes about. The selection process was designed as a Brobdingnagian commercial for the American people and the American system – its openness, its meticulous meritocratic fairness. A vast public quest to find the best of the best and shoot them at the moon. Perhaps inevitably, it now looks like a locus classicus of white male privilege. The criteria were never strictly mission-related (for what was the mission? Mainly just riding along, hoping not to die), but more semiotic and political. For starters Eisenhower limited the field to military test pilots, and the final group ended up being all male, all white, all Protestant.
But the narrative required that the cadre be abundantly and publicly tested. This is where my dad comes into the picture. He was part of a team of physicians at Lovelace Clinic, in Albuquerque, charged with certifying the astronauts as medically spaceworthy, culling the field still further in some cases. Wolfe has a lot of fun with how sketchy the parameters of this mission necessarily were. No one really knew what the physical and mental qualifications for an astronaut should be. Matchless courage of course, but that was cheap, it could be taken for granted in those straitlaced postwar days. But beyond that, what? Even then it seemed clear (as the history of space travel since mostly proves), that the choices are pretty much a) the machinery works and you come back alive; or b) it doesn’t and you don’t. Your resistance to g forces or even your ability to make decisions under stress is unlikely to make much difference.
Nevertheless, the doctors at Lovelace did what doctors do: ran lots of tests, recorded lots of data. Dad has a cameo in the book (unnamed, alas) as the physician who shot quantities of freezing water into the astronauts’ ears, then noted their reactions. He had other jobs too, involving everything from treadmills to sensory deprivation tanks to enema bags, and a slightly sardonic attitude about it all that, if you like, confirms Wolfe’s thesis that the tests were more PR events than medical or military ones.
But it was through the testing that Dad met Wally – this Wally, the one in the news just now – and formed a friendship that lasted about five decades. Not long after the Mercury Seven had been selected and certified, to huge fanfare, another cohort was forming in the shadows: “the Mercury Thirteen,” as Martha Ackmann would call them in a book of that name, not published till 2004. (Dad fares a little better there, with several citations in the index.) These were women – women! – who aspired to do what the men were doing, i.e., riding unspeakably large and violent rockets into space and with luck, back.
Unlike the men, these were not the essentially passive victors in a huge top-down talent search. They were a self-created, self-starting natural elite: women aviators who had bucked the system all their lives, fighting through every kind of gender-based obstacle to pursue their passion for flight. Ipso facto and willy-nilly, all of them were also first wave feminists. Wally was the youngest of the group, just 21 but with an incredible 3000 flying hours already logged. She got into the program by writing a pushy letter to Randy Lovelace, founder and CEO of the Clinic.
Women in space! Of course the idea was preposterous, and squarely at odds with the mission. Even the feminists would tell you that wars were started and fought by men, and a multibillion-dollar propaganda surrogate for World War III simply must, by definition, feature men, ours versus theirs, “Russians and Americans facing off in single combat in the heavens,” as Wolfe puts it. The women’s project was out of bounds, beside the point, doomed from the start.
But no one seems to have told the women, and some idealistic soul at NASA decided that something might come from the program, or at least that the ladies should be humored for a while. Anyone who has read Lysistrata will know why this was a bad idea, and Ackmann’s fine book richly details the story. The women bonded and communicated, they lobbied and prepared and wrote endless letters. They called on surprisingly influential connections. They refused to be discouraged, and they believed they were meant to go to space. Finally someone at NASA answered one of the long letters, and the group got invited to Lovelace for testing.
In an interview he gave around 2005 (the VHS is around here somewhere), Dad, to my lasting pride, says for the record, “The women actually did better than the men on the tests.” Of course, the tests in themselves were never meant to be decisive in the grand contest for the mantle of Ham, the ticket to the galaxy’s ultimate thrill ride. Still, they were revealing, in more ways (obviously) than NASA intended. What happened at Lovelace was what had to happen: the natural elite beat the confected one; the prize bulls got smoked by the band of scrappy mustang fillies.
If this mattered at all, it mattered negatively: finally alert to the magnitude of the danger – that their chosen cast of international space stars might be eclipsed by this band of upstart Amazons – NASA, Lyndon Johnson, and all the guys put the kibosh on the program in 1962.
But Wally (as you will be hearing in the coming weeks) never stopped believing. On her own hook, she fattened her resume with continuing tests, talking her way into a centrifuge ride at USC, wearing a tight merry widow because the government wouldn’t loan her one of the classified G suits. She worked as an NTSA investigator and FAA inspector and pilot instructor. When NASA finally, grudgingly, began admitting women to astronaut training in the eighties, she promptly applied. They had to keep inventing new reasons (you’re not an engineer, you’re too old now) to turn her down.
Over the years she stayed pretty good friends with Dad and Mom. She would fly herself up from Dallas, packing just one little bag, and stay in the folks’ rambling wreck of a house while she visited friends in Albuquerque. Alone among mortals, she called him “Boats,” after his favorite hobby and email address. Somehow or other, Dollie and I never crossed paths with her until the aughts, when the folks’ health began failing, they needed us more, and our visits from Illinois began to grow longer. My first clear memory of Wally has her standing in my folks’ driveway, giving hand signals while I gingerly back our big fifth wheel camper into the backyard, through a tight gate.
Wally was just what you see in the videos: a very tall woman with ramrod posture and a splendid head of thick, short, blazing white hair, dressed mannishly in cords and a crisply pressed, sharp-collared shirt. Apparently Mom had spotted me backing the rig and expressed some concern, and Wally, thinking she must help, bounded down the stairs to my assistance.
People always try to give directions when you back a camper, especially if you are doing it badly. I learned long ago to pay no attention: you have no idea of their abilities, intentions, or what they really mean by this or that gesture; best muddle through on your own. Wally’s hand signals, though, were different from most people’s: more fluid and vigorous and a great deal more elaborate, almost like ASL. They must have been the signals an FAA inspector would naturally use in any average situation. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy giving them, and (again, unlike most people) showed no annoyance at all when I ignored her. Once we had the camper parked, she came over, thrust out a hand, and said, I swear, something on the order of, “Hi, I’m Wally, your folks’ friend. You know, the astronaut?”
Anyway she was just like that, as I found out over the next week or so, while Dollie and I shared the folks’ hospitality with her. She never tired of telling people how she had almost gone to space but been shafted by NASA. She liked confiding that she had beaten John Glenn’s record in the sensory deprivation chamber. But she told the tale without a trace of bitterness. The point was never that men were jerks or that the system sucked. It was that life was endlessly surprising and rather wonderful – for look at all that she had done – if sometimes a bit cruel.
That great smile you see in the Bezos video was always ready, just her routine sense of and approach to life. Unflagging optimism and joie de vivre. “Anyway, I still might go,” she told us once or twice. “Maybe when Richard Branson goes up.” Dollie and I would swallow and look at our coffee. This was four decades after Wally’s chance seemed to have come and gone. She could still pilot a tiny aircraft up from Dallas, but she had trouble remembering the directions to Walmart, about a mile from the house.
One morning shed surprising light on the small suitcase and the crisp jeans. Up early for some reason, I stumbled into the laundry room (there was a spare refrigerator in there) to find Wally ironing what seemed to be the only pants she had packed for the trip. Not even slightly embarrassed, she wrinkled her nose at Mom’s ancient iron and said, “I should have these done in just a coupla minutes.”
That was the folks’ house in those days. Nothing worked, the yogurt in the fridge might be two years old, and most of the rooms had old broken TVs serving as end tables. But everyone was welcome, and if you got up early enough you might bump into a pretty famous almost-astronaut in her skivvies.
My takeaway: you don’t get to be famous by giving in to embarrassment or other forms of self-doubt. The tradeoff, maybe, is that the great tend to be full of themselves, obsessed with their own projects. Wally was a little that way, but what mattered was her overflowing good cheer and good will. Now she gets the last laugh on everybody, but it will be the nicest, least gloating laughter you could imagine.
Keep your dreams, old people. You just never know what life may serve up next. God bless Wally! And just this once, God bless Jeff Bezos.
