When the New Shepard capsule touched down in the West Texas desert in July 2021, the hatch opened to reveal an 82-year-old woman beaming with a mixture of elation and impatience. “I’ve been waiting a long time,” Wally Funk declared, before adding, with the briskness of a lifelong pilot, “I want to go again — fast.” The moment, broadcast around the world, was the culmination of a journey that had begun six decades earlier, when Funk was among a group of women who passed the same gruelling astronaut tests as NASA’s Mercury Seven but were never allowed to fly. Funk died on Wednesday at an assisted-living facility in Grapevine, Texas, aged 87, her caregiver, city councilwoman Duff O’Dell, confirmed.

Funk was 21 when she became the youngest of the so-called Mercury 13, a cohort of female pilots who underwent physical and psychological examinations identical to those endured by the men selected for America’s first human spaceflight programme. The tests, conducted between 1960 and 1961, were privately funded and not part of NASA’s official selection process. Despite performing as well as — and in some cases better than — the male candidates, the women were blocked from joining the astronaut corps. Viewed from Washington at the time, the decision reflected a rigid cultural assumption that space was a masculine domain; NASA would not admit women to its astronaut programme until 1978. Funk, who had earned her pilot’s licence as a teenager, never stopped believing she would get there.

That belief was finally vindicated when Jeff Bezos selected her as an “honoured guest” for the first crewed flight of his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. At 82, she became the oldest person to travel to space, surpassing the record set by John Glenn at 77. Her mark was later eclipsed by Star Trek actor William Shatner and by Ed Dwight, America’s first Black astronaut candidate, both of whom flew at 90. Yet for many observers, Funk’s flight carried a particular symbolic weight: it closed a circle that had been broken open by the Mercury 13, whose story had long been a footnote in space history. In Brazil, news of her death led bulletins with the image of her emerging from the capsule, a figure of belated triumph.

Beyond the space narrative, Funk’s professional life was a catalogue of firsts. She was the first female flight instructor at a US military base, the first woman to become an air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, and the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration. O’Dell, who was at her side when she died, described her as “the most eternally optimistic person” she had ever met. “She was told by many, many, many men, ‘No, you can’t do this. No, you can’t do that,’” O’Dell recalled. “And she never got mad about it. She just was more determined.” Funk herself, in a 2021 interview, put it plainly: “I could always beat the guys on what they were doing because I was always stronger and I’ve always done everything on my own.”

In the end, the image that lingers is not of a record-breaker but of a woman who, at an age when most have long since abandoned youthful dreams, climbed out of a spacecraft and immediately asked to go again. Her story, as NASA administrator Jared Isaacman noted, will “continue to inspire generations of Americans.” But the resonance extends further: in a Malaysian news report, the city councilwoman’s tribute was rendered as “determination proves that dreams have no expiry date.” That determination, forged in the hangars and testing rooms of the early 1960s, never dimmed. Wally Funk’s life was a long, patient rebuttal to every “no” she ever heard.