Guess Who’s Going to Space With Jeff Bezos?
In the beginning, the small group of Americans who aspired to become astronauts had to pass an isolation test. Spaceflight wasn’t going to be easy, and the country wanted people with tough minds.
For his test, John Glenn sat at a desk in a dark, soundproofed room. He found some paper in the darkness, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, and spent the test writing some poems in silence. He walked out three hours later.
For her test, Wally Funk floated inside a tank of water in a dark, soundproofed room. She couldn’t see, hear, or feel anything. She emerged 10 hours and 35 minutes later, not because she was done, but because the doctor administering the test decided it might be time to pull her out.
Glenn went on to orbit Earth and one of the most recognizable names in American spaceflight. He died in 2016, the last member of NASA’s first class of astronauts. Funk never flew to space, and most people had probably never heard of her until today, when Jeff Bezos that Funk would join him on , aboard his own rocket, built by his company Blue Origin. Three weeks from now, Funk will blast off into the sky, experience a few glorious minutes of weightlessness, and come back down. At 82, she is poised to become the oldest person to fly to space—a record currently held by Glenn, who went to space for the last time when he was .
