Wally Funk, the last surviving member of the Mercury 13 and the oldest woman ever to fly into space, has died peacefully at her home in Grapevine, Texas, at the age of 87. She first sought to become an astronaut in the early 1960s, when she and 12 other women pilots underwent the same physical and psychological tests as NASA's first male astronauts through the privately run Lovelace Woman in Space Program. Although the women performed as well as or better than their male counterparts, NASA required its astronauts to be jet test pilots, and the US military did not then admit women to its flight programmes, so none of them flew. Funk finally realised her ambition 60 years later, aged 82, aboard Blue Origin's first crewed suborbital flight.

Funk boarded the New Shepard capsule alongside Jeff Bezos on 20 July 2021 for a roughly 10-minute flight, becoming the 585th person to enter space and the 26th to fly beyond 50 miles' altitude, and earning the FAA's 13th set of Commercial Space Astronaut Wings. Born Mary Wallace Funk in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1939, she built a pioneering aviation career: she was the first female flight instructor at a US military base, the first woman to become an FAA flight inspector, and the first female air safety investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board. She published a memoir in 2020, was awarded a Guinness World Record and the National Air and Space Museum's Michael Collins Trophy, was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame in 2024, and will be posthumously inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame later this year. Unmarried and without children, she outlived all her fellow Mercury 13 members and the Mercury 7 astronauts.