Wally Funk's Race for Space

by Sue Nelson

  Wally peered at the piece of paper I handed her, deliberately printed in large type. She took a deep breath and began. ‘Two …’ – there was a long pause – ‘… of the Mercury 13, Jerrie Cobb and Jane Hart wrote to President John Kennedy. It resulted in a public hearing two YEARS before the civil rights ACT … MADE … sex discrimination illegal. Astronauts Scott Carpenter and John Glenn were among those REPRESENTING …’ Another pause.

  ‘… NASA … speaking against having women ASTRONAUTS. There were several appeals, but it took ANOTHER sixteen years before women … could be … come … part of America’s ASTRONAUT selection process in 1978.’

  Wally ended the link with a coughing fit and I tried not to panic. It wasn’t just the idiosyncratic delivery. Was she fit enough for our flight to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston the next day? We were scheduled to meet a number of inspirational women, the modern versions of Wally in different areas of the space industry. But once she had cleared her throat, she bounced around the room again, searching for something.

  ‘Here it is.’ In an age where streaming was making my DVD collection obsolete, Wally held up a video cassette and inserted it into a large black machine.

  It was a Travel Channel cable TV report of her trip to Star City and the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Kazakhstan in 2000. The producers had paid the fee for her to experience a week-long programme of cosmonaut training experiences. She wanted me to watch it. I put the recorder on pause.

  According to the commentary Wally, or the ‘woman of steel’ as they referred to her, was being strapped into a centrifuge. ‘There’s no going back now,’ the disembodied voice said. ‘Any last words?’

  ‘I just hope I don’t swallow my tongue,’ Wally responded.

  ‘Speaking of tongues,’ the voiceover continued, in a commentary as cheesy as the accompanying music soundtrack, ‘keep in mind that all of the controls are in Russian. One wrong button and it’s do svidaniya Wally!’

  Wally emerged from the centrifuge as calm and confident as a woman who had looped the loop and barnstormed in planes since she was a teenager. ‘Hi guys. It was fantastic,’ she said. ‘I want to do more!’

  Wally then underwent weightlessness inside a Russian cargo plane as it performed a series of parabolic arcs, from 35,000 feet to 10,000 feet and back again. There’s a reason these planes are nicknamed “vomit comets”’. Wally was dismissive. ‘I never got sick.’

  As if in homage to the sexism women astronauts have experienced over history, the voiceover announced: ‘Wally is not complaining about a little air turbulence. After all, how often does one lose weight after their vacation? But unfortunately those pounds don’t stay off by themselves and all too soon it’s time for re-entry.’

  At the end of the report, Wally stated her aim to go into space and be in orbit in 2003. Thirteen years later, and over fifty years since her secret astronaut tests, she was still waiting. I asked her to stop the tape. It was now 2016 and she still hadn’t gone up. It was too painful for words.

  The joy on her face, upside down and attempting somersaults in microgravity, had been plain to see. ‘The parabolic flight was one of the greatest things I’ve ever done,’ she said. ‘And I knew to practice in a swimming pool here to propel myself in a loop, in a roll and swim so that I could do it in the aircraft as the aircraft is diving down towards the Earth. They showed about three times but we did about twenty. This was a chance for me to go back to Russia and see Star City as I couldn’t get in there on prior vacations.’

  It was clear that Wally’s preparations for space had never stopped. I couldn’t take her to space but at least, by presenting my radio programme, she would meet some interesting people in the space industry. I handed her another piece of A4 paper to rehearse a different interview link and advised her to slow down this time and to try and make it more conversational.

  She cleared her throat again and concentrated. ‘The first WOMAN in space was a RUSSIAN! Valentina Tereshkova.’ She rolled her ‘r’ in ‘Tereshkova’ so long it made the word at least two seconds longer.

  ‘It was on June 16, nineteen … sixty … THREE. And she spent TWO DAYS and TWENTY-TWO HOURS on board Voshtok 6.’

  I interjected with ‘Vostok 6’, and she repeated it correctly. ‘When Valentina came to London for the opening of the COSMONAUT exposition …’

  ‘Exhibition.’

  ‘Oh. When Valentina came to London for the opening of the COSMONAUT expedition …’

  ‘Exhibition.’

  ‘Didn’t I just say that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know I met her?’

  I hadn’t. Wally leapt across the room and searched through some photograph albums. There she was in the Soviet Union in 1988, in full aviation uniform talking to Tereshkova through an interpreter. She had been part of an international women pilots’ delegation with the Ninety-Nines.

  Before I left for the motel and a much-needed sleep, we tried another link. This one was an introduction to one of our first interviewees at NASA in Houston. We had a busy schedule ahead and it had taken months of negotiation, but our interviewees would include a female flight director, an astronaut and flight surgeon. I hoped. The flight surgeon was confirmed and the link covered her work retrieving and checking the NASA astronauts who returned from the Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. An experience that has been described by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly as like ‘going over Niagara Falls in a barrel – that’s on fire’.

  On scanning the words, I realised that the script mentioned that the flight surgeon’s role took her out to Kazakhstan. This could be trouble.

  Wally practised her first question. ‘When you go to KachaSTAN to check ASTRONAUTS in the…’

  I stopped her for a correction. ‘Kazakhstan.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No. You said Kachastan. It’s Kazakhstan.’

  ‘Okay … ’ She took a deep breath. ‘When you go to KachaSTAN to …’

  ‘KaZAKhstan.’

  ‘When you go to KACHAstan to check ASTRONAUTS …’

  ‘KaZAKhstan.’

  ‘Kacha …’

  ‘KaZAK…’

  ‘When you go to KachaSTAN to check ASTRONAUTS…’

  ‘Eight minutes later we were still recording that one line. We had only four days to get our interviews and record all the other US-based material and links. This was not a promising start.

  ‘KaCHASTAN …’

  ‘KaZAKhstan.’

  ‘Kazakchan.

  ‘KazakhSTAN. Can’t I just say Russia?’

  2

  Houston, We Have a Problem

  ‘Okay, see the slats on the wing. They’re down … that helps slow us up a little bit. Well, let’s see now, there’s a river …’

  It was more monologue than conversation. Probably because I wore headphones and was listening to Wally’s recollections and the programme links we recorded at her home in Dallas the night before. Yet, despite the aircraft noise, and her voice in the headphones, Wally remained audible in the next seat.

  ‘Didn’t they have some flooding down here not so long ago? Maybe that’s not the right town? The name will come to me eventually …’

  During the descent it took a while to realise that the commentary had stopped. Wally’s head was arched backwards, face to the ceiling, eyes shut, mouth open. Totally still. For an awful moment I thought she had died in her sleep. Then a small ripple of air escaped from her throat and caused her to start. She peered across my lap out of the window and picked up where she’d left off. ‘We’re at 2,000 feet right now …’

  Since the running commentary might be useful material for the radio programme, I searched for the recording machine in the bag under my seat. If I got the levels right, we could hear Wally clearly above the engine. I asked her to explain where we were, where we were going, and why. Her response, as befitted a pilot, was extraordinarily precise.

  ‘We’re on flight 5849 from DFW to Houston and we
are about 1,500 feet above the ground, landing south at Houston, and in a few minutes you’re going to hear the gear make its contact with the runway. We’ll have three gears, one on each side and the nose gear. Now we’re about 1,000 feet and we’re coming down at around 400 feet per minute, and now we’re about 600 feet.’

  Time for a prompt. Why were we coming to Houston?

  ‘So Sue and I can have a good time at NASA with the important people we’re going to meet!’

  Wally snorted with laughter and I felt slightly guilty. I hadn’t told her that, despite several months of negotiations, NASA had only confirmed an interview with the flight surgeon the day before, and was yet to confirm which of my other requests had been granted, including an astronaut from the class of 2013 and a flight director. All women. From past experience, the US space agency always came through, but not knowing exactly who we would get had been extraordinarily stressful. I’d had to go ahead and book flights on past experience and a prayer. Hopefully some emails would be waiting for me when we arrived in Houston. She didn’t need to know about the sleepless nights.

  ‘Now we’re about 100 feet and the runway’s in sight, and we’re going to be having a wonderful time, and the runway is ten feet, five feet … on …’ She paused. ‘Right now …’

  On cue, the wheels hit the runway and the plane shook briefly from side to side. ‘And the brakes are being put on.’ There was a wrenching screech. ‘Sounds like he’s got rough brakes … and we’re turning on the taxi way …’

  At an airport rental company Wally and I collided shoulders beside the car like two NFL footballers. Both of us had tried to get into the driver’s seat at the same time. A perfect metaphor for our situation. Once we’d ascertained roles – no discussion allowed, as mine was the only name on the rental agreement – we headed towards downtown Houston accompanied by an annoying and persistent beeping sound. Unable to locate the cause, we had almost reached our hotel before I realised what was going on. ‘Can you put your seat belt on, Wally?’

  ‘It’s okay. I never wear one.’

  ‘It’s not okay to me, I’m afraid. Can you put your seat belt on please?’

  ‘Why? It’s not bothering you.’

  ‘What if I have to brake suddenly? You’ll go through the window.’

  ‘Well, honey,’ she said, in a voice that betrayed a touch of irritation, a smidgen of sweetness and a large dose of bloody-mindedness, ‘that’s my problem.’

  Two could play at that game. ‘I’m not driving if you don’t put it on.’

  A disgruntled mumbling accompanied the familiar clank of a metal seat belt clasp. The beeps stopped. At the hotel, Wally ordered some short, hard pillows and stated that something important needed to be sorted out first. ‘I need cranberry juice. I can’t do anything without my cranberry juice.’

  ‘Have you tried reception?’

  ‘They don’t have any.’

  ‘Have you tried the drinks machine?’

  ‘That’s no good. It has to be a certain strength, honey, and there’s only one brand I like that’s good enough. I need to go to the mall. I asked them where it was and it’s real close by.’

  ‘Okay. I can drive there in the morning.’

  ‘I need it tonight, but you don’t need to drive me. I can go by myself.’

  ‘You’re not insured on the car.’

  ‘It’s okay, honey.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  Stalemate. Someone had to cave in. I would drive her to the mall. We’d meet back downstairs in fifteen minutes. ‘Sure,’ she said, and mumbled about having left something in the car. I gave her the keys so she could fetch it. Fifteen minutes later, outside the hotel, I headed towards the parking space and realised the rental car was missing.

  ‘Over here, honey.’ Both Wally and the rental car were parked, to my right, outside reception.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ I scolded.

  Wally had the grace to look slightly shamefaced. ‘I only wanted to do something nice.’

  It was indeed a short drive, and the seat belt warning was blissfully silent. A small victory. At the mall I drove slowly around the shop fronts as Wally staked out the restaurants, nail bars and clothes stores. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that might sell cranberry juice. Eventually we rounded a corner and spotted a supermarket. As I began to turn the rental car off the main drive to the right, towards a row of parking spaces, I got a shock. Wally’s seat was empty and I was driving with the passenger-side car door wide open.

  A disturbing thud reverberated from the front of the car and my foot automatically hit the brake. I must have hit a pedestrian. Except there wasn’t a passer-by on the other side of the windscreen. It was Wally, in the middle of the road, and very much alive.

  The thump had been her hand, slammed on the bonnet to stop the car from hitting her. I was too shocked to say a word. She stretched out her other hand in a policeman-style halt position and, as my mouth remained open and silent, Wally strode forcefully towards the supermarket entrance, shouting over her shoulder: ‘I’ll be right back!’

  Once parked, slightly shaken after almost running over my presenter, I noticed that her seat belt was tightly fastened and flat across the passenger seat. It was as if she’d performed a Houdini trick and escaped from her bonds without unlocking the shackles. She’d obviously buckled it up and simply sat on the locked seat belt after our dispute. This explained why the car’s seat belt alarm hadn’t triggered. Beneath the irritation, I was curious as to how the hell a seventy-seven-year-old had moved from her seat to the front of a moving car so quickly. And, to be honest, more than a little impressed.

  The next morning we headed first to Space Center Houston. The Official Visitor Center for the NASA Johnson Space Center was just across the road, where our interviews – now all confirmed – would take place in the afternoon. The idea was to record Wally offering some impromptu observations at the museum whenever something relevant triggered a memory. The British-born American journalist Alistair Cooke, whose Letter from America radio broadcasts ran from 1946 to 2004, famously reported that, during a school survey after World War II, when television was relatively new, a seven-year-old boy said he preferred radio ‘because the pictures were better’. It was true. Location recording and its sounds allowed people to envisage the scene in their minds.

  After showing our tickets at the main gate, Wally issued a range of instructions as I drove into the parking lot. ‘I like to back up into a space and make sure you find somewhere in the shade. Mother told me that.’ It was good advice, considering the heat. Then Wally began shouting. ‘Wow. Oh wow.’

  Wow indeed. To our right, by the museum entrance, a Space Shuttle appeared to float above a huge plane, piggybacking on a modified Boeing 747. This was known as the NASA shuttle carrier aircraft 905, and there was nowhere else in the world where you could see this configuration of shuttle and shuttle carrier up close. ‘Just wait until I’ve stopped the car before you get out,’ I warned.

  Too late. A draft of warm air wafted across my lap. Wally’s distinctive brisk and rolling gait, caused by a hip operation that left one leg slightly shorter than the other, hastened her across the parking lot into the best position to take a photo of the plane–shuttle combo. Wally’s two favourite things in the world, aviation and space travel, were in the same shot.

  The museum was fun and exhausting in equal measure. Wally’s enthusiasm for everything around us was totally uplifting; she was so uncool in expressing her enjoyment that it became cool. Full of energy, she asked a stream of questions, although many of them could have been answered if she’d stood still long enough to read the exhibit displays. After a while, I responded to any questions by simply telling her to read the signs. It didn’t seem to offend her in any way.

  We entered Skylab, the cylindrical space station from the 1970s, and it was so well done that it took a while for us to realise that the man somersaulting in microgravity wasn’t real. Wally had addressed the manne
quin. ‘How does it feel up there, Mister? Wow, I would love to go sailing through there like the guys did.’

  A lift inside took us to the entrance of Space Shuttle Independence. When we emerged several storeys higher, we were outside and the sunlight dazzled us. There was the black-and-white tiled spaceplane. ‘You didn’t say when we were parking we were going in a shuttle,’ Wally said happily.

  While the carrier aircraft beneath it had carried real space shuttles 223 times, the spaceplane on its back was not one of them.

  ‘It’s a replica, but full-scale, so it’s going to feel like the real thing. I’m taking you to space Wally.’

  ‘That’s okay, honey. I wouldn’t want to go with anybody else but you.’

  It was an outrageous act of flattery. Sure, we’d kept in touch on and off for years, but we hardly knew each other. If I hadn’t sent a recent photograph to her, as requested, she wouldn’t have recognised me in the motel reception. Wally quickly had second thoughts about her space trip. ‘Maybe Eileen.’

  While staff validated our tickets, she then went into full exuberant Wally mode. ‘Hi! You guys must have a good time here. How many employees are here? I guess you’re loving it, huh? Hi, how are you?’

  Wally addressed the young man who scanned our tickets. ‘Are you going to be our pilot today?’

  ‘The last time I took it for a spin,’ he replied dryly, ‘I took it through a Wendy’s parking lot and the city didn’t like it.’

  Inside the payload bay, Wally examined the instrumentation. ‘Now the brown and white is your artificial horizon, the other one is your compass …’

  ‘Similar to an aircraft?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A video streamed on a display near the Canadian robotic arm, and she spotted a familiar face. ‘There’s Eileen Collins.’

  When we left the payload bay to appreciate the view of the shuttle again from outside, Wally sighed. ‘My gosh, we got in the shuttle.’ We leaned against the top of a wall above the aircraft and across from the shuttle. How did she feel watching Collins’s launch?