Ask someone to name of a female astronaut. They might say Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Maybe you’ll get a brief rendition of Wilson Pickett’s ‘Mustang Sally’. What you won’t hear is the name Wally Funk, even if it’s just as musical, and even if Funk herself was as qualified to go to space as anyone who trained at NASA. However, she was passed over three times since starting astronaut training in 1961, and she only made it to outer space in a sub-orbital flight aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021, at a spry-but-advanced age of 82. After that flight, Mary Wallace Funk became the oldest person of any gender to travel to space, until William Shatner claimed the title at age 90, thanks again to Bezos’ Blue Origin. (Funk took a previous flight in 2012 aboard Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic ship, a trip she paid for out of her own pocket.) She remains the oldest woman in space, a highly dubious honor: If things had gone differently in the 1960s, she could well have been the first woman in space from any nation and gone on to make major contributions to space travel, instead of orbiting around its edges for most of her 87 years (Funk passed away this month).    Wally Funk in the cockpit of an AT-6 training plane. Photo Don Cravens, Getty Images Funk began her preparations for space flight in 1961 as part of group of 13 women pilots called FLATS (First Lady Astronaut Trainees). They referred to themselves as the Mercury 13, after the Mercury 7 astronauts. Their privately-funded program was unofficial, but many at NASA supported it and wanted to see it succeed. The youngest member of the group at 21, Funk made short work of the rigorous physical and psychological testing required of all astronauts. She placed third best in the program and beat John Glenn on several test scores, as she was fond of reminding audiences everywhere.  Despite the apparent success of the Mercury 13 program, and the readiness of young pilot Wally Funk, NASA cancelled the program and with it, Funk’s first chance to become an astronaut. It would be almost two decades before NASA accepted female applicants. ‘When Sally Ride finally became the first [American] woman in space in 1983, Funk was overjoyed’, Richard Stolley writes at Time. ‘But Ride was a scientist, called a mission specialist; Funk wanted to fly into space, not just ride there. By the time, in 1995, the first woman, Lieut. Colonel Eilleen Collins, piloted a shuttle into space, Funk was too old to qualify’.   Wally Funk as an aviation-obsessed teenager Her story is far from tragic. Funk’s work in aviation placed her in a long series of highly accomplished firsts. After graduating from Oklahoma State University’s ‘flying Aggies’ flight program in 1960, she was hired at only 20 years old as the first female and first civilian instructor at Ft. Sill, a training facility for Air Force pilots. She then went on to a life in aviation that included posts as the first Federal Aviation Agency inspector and the first National Transportation Safety Board crash investigor.  Wally Funk puts on a gas mask during astronaut training. Photo Carl Iwasaki, Getty Images The early triumphs of the Mercury 13 pilots turned into disappointment for the women in the group, but they knew their participation mattered, opening the way for later astronauts like Ride and, eventually, Mae Jemison and Sunita Williams. Funk and her sister pilots ‘forced NASA, the White House and Congress to rethink what women were capable of doing and what women wanted to do’, says Martha Ackmann, professor of gender studies at Mount Holyoke College. ‘If the Mercury 13 women had failed, they would have set back all possibilities for American women to go into space’. The burden must have weighed heavily, but Funk bore it with indefatigable lightness.    Wally Funk with other Mercury 13 aspiring astronauts Rhea Hurrle and Jerrie Cobb. Photo Carl Iwasaki, Getty Images Wally Funk with members of the 1961 Mercury 13 test pilot group in the 80s Current setbacks to decades of movements for gender equality make it seem imperative to note that ‘all 13 women passed the same physical tests as the men’, as Janet Varnum writes in a profile of Funk. ‘In fact, the scientists found few differences between the sexes, except the ‘”women didn’t whine as much”‘. Despite the fact that the Soviets sent a woman cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, into space in 1963, when it came to the US program, ‘expediency was put ahead of equity’—meaning it was simply faster and easier to reproduce existing biases than to try to challenge them. John Glenn flatly summed up the sentiment at a US House of Representatives hearing on the subject with a circular explanation: ‘The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order’.  Funk did not accept this judgment. ‘Things were cancelled? So what? Wally’s going on,’ she told The Guardian in 2019. Yet even after the field opened to women, she was rejected three times from astronaut training because she lacked an engineering degree and because she was not a test pilot. The latter disqualification must have been particularly galling. Women were not allowed to become Air Force test pilots at the time, even though as a civilian instructor, Funk had trained many of the men who were.   Wally Funk in the cockpit at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, 1991 In her 70s, she continued to prepare for space flight, reliving ‘the sensation’, writes Varnum, ‘of five g-forces at Star City, a Russian cosmonaut training center, where she also wore a 300-pound space suit and learned to dock a spacecraft simulator with an orbiting space station’. While flying and ‘teaching aviation have been my life’, she said, traveling to space was her dream. Once she acheived it, she didn’t want to come back down. It seems safe to say that Funk was the most qualified person on that flight with Bezos, and that includes the crew. Learn more about her exploits and those of her fellow pilots in the Mercury 13 group from her memoir Highter, Faster, Longer. Women’s crucial role in sending the US into space in the 1960s only started to be seen in recent media like book and film Hidden Figures. Wally Funk and her fellow pilots’ stories seem to beg for a Hollywood treatment and a major revision of their part in history. Wally Funk Describes Her First Spaceflight at Age 82 The post Wally Funk, the Oldest Woman in Space, Almost Became the First Woman in Space in 1961 appeared first on Flashbak.

Star Molly Ringwald influenced John Hughes on the soundtrack.

“Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically” — Plato      “Bust portrait of William III and Mary in state robes, in two ovals facing towards each other, printed within calligraphic flourishes; a cutting of the top left corner from a official legal document. 1690s Engraving printed from a single plate on vellum” by William Elder.   Bust portrait of Queen Anne in state robes(a)   Bust portrait of William III in state robes (a)     “Bust portrait of William III in state robes, with garter chain, in an oval facing left, printed within a second plate with calligraphic flourishes; a cutting of the top left corner from a official legal document. 1690s Engraving printed from two plates on vellum” (Anonymous).       “Portrait of Charles II in penmanship, drawn in an oval with calligraphic flourishes on all sides, printed on the Thames in the Frost Fair of 1684 Engraving” “Lettered with motto round frame, and below ”Invented, performed by command of hand & engraven by John Seddon. Carp not at what you see for tis no more than th’untaught act of one ne’r grav’d before’, and ‘Printed on the River of Thames, Feb.1683/4’. ” “The bust of Charles is composed of calligraphic flourishes. John Seddon was the leading calligrapher of the time, and master of Sir John Johnson’s Free Writing School in Priest’s Court, Foster Lane. His portrait was drawn by William Faithorne (Vertue I 140), and was engraved by John Sturt as the frontispiece for his copy-books, such as ‘The Ingenious youth’s companion’ of c.1690 and ‘The pen-man’s paradise’ of c.1695. These were engraved after his work by others. This print declares that it was the first plate he engraved himself, and it probably remained the only one.”     Bust portrait of Charles I in state robes     All but the last of the above images were found in the marvellous British Museum Prints Database. The more esoteric and specific the style or theme, the harder it is to find desirable images, seems to me. More image captions and metadata please! Via: Bibliodessey The post Calligraphy Portraits appeared first on Flashbak.

Did you know that its most famous line was improvised?