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 become the first American 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 announced that Funk would join him on his journey to space, 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 77 years old.
Glenn and Funk took their isolation tests during the exhilarating beginnings of the American space program, but their experiences didn’t overlap. Glenn was part of the Mercury program, NASA’s first attempt to send men—and, at the time, only men—to space, while Funk participated in a privately funded project meant to see how women held up to the pressures of spaceflight. Randy Lovelace, the doctor in charge of the effort, had worked with NASA’s male astronauts, and he suspected that women might fare just as well, or even better, than men in the tiny, cramped spaceships that NASA had planned; women are, on average, lighter and smaller, and would require less food and oxygen, scientists suggested at the time. Lovelace recruited female pilots under 40, matching the age requirements of NASA’s real astronaut corps. In the early 1960s, Funk and the others underwent the same intense barrage of physical and psychological tests that Lovelace had developed for the NASA men. The screenings were meant to push participants to exhaustion; as no one knew yet the toll spaceflight would have on a human body, sending astronauts at peak fitness seemed like an important hedge for success.