Wally Funk's Race for Space

by Sue Nelson

  These ratings included qualifications to fly a sea plane and a glider, and later becoming an instructor herself. Not surprisingly, when not talking about space, Wally talks aviation. Earlier that day in the car, she had recalled watching the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, the air demonstration teams for the US Air Force and Navy respectively, from air traffic control towers. When down on the ground, she would hang out at the Ninety-Nines booth belonging to the women-only pilots’ organisation. Former students would often approach her and say hello. Recently she recognised one of them but couldn’t recall from where or when until he said: ‘You gave me my private license in 1963 in Hawthorne, California.’

  At that point in her life, aged twenty-four, Wally was a chief pilot at a flight school. I asked her how many people she had taught to fly since then. When she answered it was my turn to shout: ‘Three thousand? Wow!’

  ‘But you know everything about me, honey,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

  She knew about my husband and teenage son, so I gave her the short version of the rest: eldest of six, parents divorced, estranged from my mother for the best part of twenty-five years. Considering Wally’s closeness to her own mother, that last fact visibly shocked her. But I considered myself lucky. My mother-in-law Penny, a wonderful woman, had been a mother in all but name for twenty years. I did not lack motherly love.

  ‘What about your house?’

  Wally was staying with me the following week in England. I pulled up an old Google Maps image of our black-and-white mock-Tudor house, typical of 1930s English suburbs, on my laptop. ‘That’s a big house,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, no, only half of that is ours. It’s semi-detached.’

  ‘Oh, they put two houses together. What about the noise? Is that common in England? That’s kinda how my apartment is – but what happens if you both want the fire going and there’s only one chimney? Do you have people or kids living next door to you? Do you hear crying?’

  Once reassured about the noise levels, I showed her the village online. ‘I don’t think I lived with anybody in England,’ she said, ‘I was always camping.’

  She cooed over photographs of Richard and our son Matthew. ‘Oh, look at how cute! Boy, is he looking dandy. Very royal. That’s a good shot of you too … I like that one. You have a good smile.’ A video cropped up. Matthew was playing water polo.

  ‘How many to a team? How are they trying to get the ball away from each other? He’s about to shoot. Good job!’

  She knew I still enjoyed playing tennis but wanted to know what other sports I had done when younger. Like Wally, I had been active and was in the school tennis, netball, gymnastics, lacrosse and trampolining teams. It wasn’t easy describing lacrosse. ‘It’s a stick with some netting on the end and you catch the ball in it and run.’

  ‘Doesn’t it fall out?’

  ‘You move your arms back and forth.’ I tucked my elbows into my ribs and waved my arms as if holding an invisible lacrosse stick. It didn’t help. Then, as if on order, a boy walked by our hotel window carrying a lacrosse stick. ‘There’s one.’ Wally ran outside and the boy let her inspect it more closely.

  I showed her some of the photos I had taken that day. ‘I didn’t realise my hair was so stupid … That one’s okay. Not that one, I’m okay but you’re frowning. You’ve got your eyes shut, so delete that one. That’s nice. Nah, that’s not so hot. God. I hate my wrinkles.’

  That was the first time I’d heard her remark on her personal appearance. It was unexpectedly negative considering how young and vital she looked. It was now or never. ‘Have you ever had any work done?’

  ‘No. And I should have done that about two years ago because mother’s face looked fabulous.’

  To be honest, it was harder to tell in America, as plastic surgery was much more common than in the UK.

  ‘Everybody has their boobs done, their eyes, their nose,’ Wally lamented. ‘Then there’s rehab. I have good insurance.’

  And good genes? ‘Oh yeah, I have good genes, but I think being out in the Sun and everything my eyes have got a little more wrinkly than I anticipated. I wish I were fifty years younger. Time goes by so quickly. It would have been fun if you had met me in my twenties. I did everything.’

  She ascribed her confidence to her mother and the spirit of the Taos Mountain. I’d heard her mention the spirit of the Taos Mountain a lot, and it bothered me. It was too hippy. And airy. Like the power of crystals or astrology. A bit … unscientific. What was this spirit? Was it related to the Native Americans she grew up around in the Taos pueblos?

  ‘No. Can you get Taos on that thing?’ She meant my laptop. I scrolled through the numerous images that came up.

  ‘There’s the mountain,’ said Wally excitedly. ‘There it is. Stop it! See, you can kind of make out the hair and the two eyes looking this way with his white collar, and that’s George Washington.’

  I couldn’t make out a thing.

  ‘That’s the spirit of Taos Mountain right there. It gave me …’, she patted her heart, ‘… the knowledge to do everything I wanted to do. Nobody taught me how to work on a model T Ford or how to crank it or how to drive a tractor when I was about ten. I got in and did it. It was second nature. When I was growing up. I just did things. How did I know how to build my house? It just came to me. So I’ve been very, very lucky in that respect. The spirit. I know it’s hard for people. People say, “Are you praying to it?” and I say, “No,” but I suppose some people do. Some people say, “If the spirit doesn’t like you – you will never come back …”’

  She pointed to the snowy peaks. ‘That’s where I skied at 12,000 feet. This picture is at 14,000. Many times, I had to take ashes and scatter them over the mountain.’

  ‘Whose ashes?’

  ‘The people. They were cremated, and people wanted their ashes to be flown over Taos Mountain. I’d get the ashes. They came in a box like a shoe would come in with a little door, and I was taught exactly how to let the ashes out little-by-little out the door. I’d make a circle around Taos Mountain and get all the ashes out of the box, and I’d do it about five or six, seven times.’

  It didn’t always go as planned. ‘One time the wife wanted to take her husband’s ashes out, and she was sitting in the back seat in their airplane. I said, you have to open the door and only have it opened about an inch, and you have to pinch out the ashes. She didn’t understand this, and before you knew it you had whatever his name was all over the cockpit.’

  Did she want to go back to Taos? ‘I thought eventually I was gonna go back there, but I don’t have any friends left. Everywhere I’ve lived, maybe they’ve died or moved somewhere else. I was thinking about Palm Springs, but my friends are gone. I’d like to go back to New Mexico, but I’ve sold the house. My friend Mary has gone from Albuquerque, and everybody’s a husband-and-wife thing and I can’t ask for help.’

  Although Wally spent a good part of the evening speaking to friends on the telephone, it sounded a lonely existence for someone who loved being surrounded by people. No wonder Wally travelled so much. By now, she’d almost finished her dinner. ‘Are you enjoying that?’

  ‘Very much,’ she replied. ‘I’m not going to leave a drop on this plate.’

  Afterwards Wally washed the dishes and wiped every surface spotless. ‘That was a nice pork chop,’ she said happily. ‘Tomorrow we can have steak again.’

  4

  The Waiting List

  ‘This is great. I like your home, honey. How is it plumbed? Where do you get your water from? Where does the power come in? That’s a big back yard. How many feet to the bottom?’

  Wally paced around the kitchen, bubbling over with energy. Things were not working out as planned. I had hoped we would both be napping by now. But within hours of arriving from Orlando into the UK at six in the morning, it was clear that the only person suffering from jet lag was me.

  Wary of the effect an overnight trans-Atlantic flight would have on Wally’s stamina and health, I had
scheduled a break at my house. The idea was to rest for a few days and ease through the transition before taking a Eurostar train to mainland Europe to continue collecting material for The First Woman on the Moon. The first stop would be Cologne, and then on to Paris for interviews with various members of the European Space Agency.

  ‘Where are your pipes, honey? You know I like to know these things. I like to know how things work. Do they come in under here? How old is this house?’

  That one I could answer. ‘It was built around 1930…’

  My brain was on slowdown and couldn’t keep up. Richard, my husband, took over. Wally had greeted him and our sixteen-year-old son, Matthew, like long-lost friends. Her natural warmth and friendliness towards them thawed my sleep-deprived irritation.

  ‘When can we see the town, honey? Shall we go now?’ All plans of a nap disappeared.

  According to the road signs, I live in a ‘pre-Roman riverside village’. It’s a picturesque part of Hertfordshire, and the River Lea, which runs through the village, is practically a stream at this point before it joins the Thames in London around thirty miles away. There is a narrow high street consisting of a church, a couple of pubs, a few shops, a Women’s Institute, plus some pretty good Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants. Wally doesn’t like spicy food so, before leaving Florida, I’d created and ordered an online shop filled with her favourite food: steak, pork chops, sweet potatoes, green vegetables, plenty of spinach and cranberry juice.

  Due to its proximity to the capital, the village contains a lot of commuters. The train station, however, which playwright George Bernard Shaw once cycled to for his own commute, closed after the Beeching Report, officially known as the Reshaping of British Railways, in 1965. A small section of track and a platform remain, restored by a local heritage society. An oak carving of Shaw now sits permanently on a bench, legs crossed, waiting for a train that will never arrive. ‘That’s neat,’ said Wally.

  We visited the tombstone of another famous local resident, the Antarctic explorer Aspley Cherry Garrard, a survivor of Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole. Wally was appreciative, asked questions I couldn’t always answer and soaked in everything. Within thirty minutes I’d run out of things to show her in the village. Plus I was exhausted after the journey from the States. Why wasn’t she tired?

  Back at our house, it didn’t take long before Wally became visibly bored. An English friend of hers was due to join us for dinner – his girlfriend was a US pilot who Wally had taught to fly – but I had nothing planned during the day. I had mistakenly assumed that, as I normally did after an overnight flight, a seventy-eight-year-old would want to rest. As someone who requires at least eight hours’ sleep, I became increasingly tetchy. After another barrage of questions about the inner construction of the house’s power supply, my voice hardened dangerously, and I marched out of the kitchen mid-conversation to avoid losing my temper. Richard was left to pick up the slack. Again.

  I know from experience that many producers fawn over presenters or treat them as if they are special and require constant coddling. Presenters are the ‘talent’. A phrase I loathe because any production – be it in radio, TV or film – cannot happen without a team of equally talented people. My first job after university was as what many people in commercial radio called a ‘sound engineer’. In the BBC, it’s known as a ‘studio manager’. I operated mixing desks, played sound effects from records on ‘gram machines’, edited tape with a razor blade, rattled tea cups and clashed swords for radio dramas. Later I went into production, reporting and presenting. But from that moment on, I knew it took a studio manager, PA, producer and editor as well as a presenter or actors, to make a programme. The presenter–producer relationship was never, for me, master and servant. No matter what side of the microphone I was on, working alongside a presenter or a producer was always a collaboration. But somehow – and it was a failing that I reflected upon with shame – I had got that balance wrong with Wally.

  Sugar-coating words was a skill I had yet to acquire but, with Wally, I realised I was often too blunt, too impatient, bossy and intolerant. Upstairs, lying on my bed, I reflected upon my inability to cut my presenter some slack. I calmed down, took several deep breaths and atoned for my sins by finding my laptop and reaching out to a good contact at an Airbus Defence and Space site nearby. No matter my own mental and physical limitations, I needed to up my game and show Wally a better time.

  The following day my space contacts got back to me. It was on. I wouldn’t tell Wally where we were headed in the car, and it was worth fending off all the questions as she was so excited at the prospect of a surprise. And boy was it a surprise. While I couldn’t arrange for Wally to go into space, I could at least take Wally to another planet.

  In Stevenage.

  Inside a brick building in the UK’s first ‘new town’, there was a thirty by thirteen-metre indoor simulation of the planet Mars. Located at Airbus’s Stevenage site, the Mars Yard consisted of 300 tonnes of red sand with the same grain size as the material covering the planet’s surface and littered with the occasional rock. The Mars Yard’s backdrop was a montage of real images of the red planet taken by NASA rovers over 30 million miles (50 million kilometres) away. A glass-panelled control room overlooked one end of the facility. Our shoes sank into the fine sand.

  ‘I’m walking on Mars,’ yelled Wally. ‘This is fantastic!’

  The Mars Yard was built to test prototype robotic rovers for what will become Europe’s first Mars rover. This rover, which will carry a drill and search for signs of life, was due to fly on-board the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission in 2020. Or, to put it another way, this was a giant Martian sand pit with robots. Our guide was the ExoMars rover’s lead spacecraft structure engineer, Abigail ‘Abbie’ Hutty.

  Hutty received the Institute of Electrical Engineering’s Young Woman Engineer of the Year award in 2013 and, like Wally, is a role model for women. Her eyes were opened to a career within the space industry by reading about Britain’s Beagle 2 Mars lander, which reached the Martian surface on Christmas Day, 2003. It didn’t matter that it failed to return a signal after one of its solar panels didn’t open. The mission showed that engineers could work on spacecraft and robotic rovers. Hutty graduated first in her class with a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Surrey. Now she led the team that was creating the Mars rover’s chassis, as well as managing its development, design and testing to ensure that the structure could withstand the launch, journey and landing on Mars. This meant she was the perfect Mars Yard guide for Wally.

  There were several prototype rovers on the red sand, and each one looked different. One resembled a rover’s metallic skeleton and was solely to test the electrical systems. ‘This rover is Bryan. We’re developing the autonomous navigation for the rover,’ Hutty explained, ‘so it’s about what the rover sees, what obstacles and rocks it climbs over and whether it can make the right kind of decision and plan a path through the terrain.’

  ‘This is great. What about this one?’ Wally pointed to the biggest rover, which was topped with solar panels and most resembled the NASA rovers that are currently on Mars. This one was called Bruno. ‘Will this go on Mars? Can I ride it? What’s going on … I love the engineering. Can you tell me what you’re doing?’

  It was a match made in heaven. Hutty could not only answer Wally’s questions, she provided the technical specifications as well. Driving home afterwards, Wally was thrilled, and kept repeating: ‘That was so great!’

  The entertainment continued into the evening, although potentially it had less chance of success since it was not space-related. Six months earlier I had joined a community choir, and once a week went to Rock Choir to sing. Tonight was an end-of-term social for friends and family.

  Musically, Wally preferred opera, classical music and church choir. Opera most of all. When she was a child, her parents took her to the Santa Fe opera house. Verdi was her favourite. Our harmo
nised versions of Beyonce’s Halo and Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now might not have the same effect. I took a punt.

  Inside the hall of a local school, Wally brightened at the sight of so many people. There was never a need to worry about Wally in a social situation because she never waited for an introduction. She simply marched up to someone and simply said, ‘Hi. I’m Wally!’ and the conversation would begin. Several hundred people were in the room enjoying snacks and drinks. Once Wally had settled in, I appreciated her personality and sheer exuberance once more. As she made new friends, and members of the choir gathered on stage to showcase several of our new numbers, I spoke to our conductor, Pippa, and briefly explained Wally’s presence and background.

  While I sang with the choir, I spotted Wally dancing joyfully and appreciatively at the side of the hall. Before our final song, Pippa addressed the audience: ‘I’d just like to say that one of our choir members has brought a very special friend. She’s called Wally Funk – an incredible name by the way – and she’s from America. And back in 1961, Wally took secret tests to become an astronaut. And she passed. But while she never made it, she’s hoping to go into space soon. So we’re thrilled to have you here. Where are you, Wally?’

  Wally raised her hand. To my surprise, she appeared embarrassed. Modest, even. Pippa addressed her directly: ‘Are you enjoying the singing?’

  ‘I love it!’ she shouted.

  The room fizzed with good will.

  The next day, before our train to Cologne, there was something important to do. Wally wanted to meet her contacts at Virgin Galactic’s new headquarters in London. Virgin Galactic is one of a number of commercial companies offering future spaceflights. These companies allowed anyone with enough money to become an astronaut. Not for a long mission, but to briefly experience life above the Earth as a space tourist. NASA and the Russian Space Agency preferred the term spaceflight participant to space tourist, but it had never really caught on.