Funk, 82, will be the oldest person ever to travel into
space, Blue Origin said in an announcement on Thursday.
"I didn't think I'd ever get to go up," Funk said
in a video interview posted on the company's website.
Funk, then a 21-year-old pilot, was the youngest of the 13
women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts
in NASA's program that first sent Americans into space between 1961 and 1963,
but were denied the chance to become astronauts themselves because of their
gender.
She is due to join Bezos's brother, Mark, and the winner of
an auction aboard the New Shepard rocket as it ascends more than 62 miles (100
km) above Earth into suborbital space. The passengers will experience a few
minutes of weightlessness and be able to marvel at the planet's curvature
through viewing windows before the pressurized passenger capsule returns to
earth under parachutes.
Bezos, the richest man on the planet, is stepping down as
the chief executive of Amazon.com Inc on July 5. He has been vying with fellow
billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson to become the first to travel into
space on a privately developed rocket.
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