Photos courtesy of Blue Origin Media

By Mary O’KEEFE

Blue Origin successfully completed New Shepard’s first human flight on Tuesday with four private citizens onboard. The crew included Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Oliver Daemen and Wally Funk.

The Blue Origin program was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also founded Amazon. The New Shepard is a reusable rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.

Onboard was Wally Funk, 82, who was one of the Mercury 13 pilots who were, for a while, being groomed to go into space during the 1960s. All 13 pilots qualified for the astronaut training but were not allowed to go into space because they were women. The tests they took matched that of the Mercury and Apollo astronauts but their program was not sponsored by NASA, officially, but funded by Jaqueline “Jackie” Cochran, a pioneer woman pilot.

The Mercury 13 women did not get to space but most continued to fly and all promoted the idea of equality in the astronaut program.

After decades of waiting, Wally Funk finally got her chance to become an astronaut. During a post-flight press conference she thanked Jeff Bezos for giving her the chance.

“I have been waiting a long time finally getting up there,” she said.

Video of her experiencing weightlessness reflected her excitement.

And was it worth it?

“[It’s] fantastic,” she said. “Oh, I love it.”