‘I’ll be flying 'til I die!’ Why Wally Funk won’t give up her lifelong space mission

The pilot broke astronaut training records in the 1960s before being told a woman's place is not in orbit. Sixty years on, she is still pursuing her dream

When Wally Funk was barely a year old, she discovered aeroplanes. Her parents took her to an airport near where they lived in New Mexico and she got up close to a Douglas DC-3, an early airliner. "I go right to the wheel and I try to turn the nut," she says. "Mother said: 'She's going to fly.'" Just over 20 years later, in 1961, Funk's mother dropped her off at a clinic in Albuquerque, where she became the youngest participant in a programme to test whether the US's best female pilots could become astronauts. She didn't make it into space, but, nearly six decades on, she is still trying.

We meet at the home of Funk's friend, the journalist Sue Nelson, who has written a wonderful book about her. Funk is 80, straight-backed and sparkling. She is dressed in a black shirt embroidered with "Wally" on one side and the logo from the organisation Women in Aviation International on the other, neatly tucked into black trousers on which she has sewn a patch for SpaceShipTwo - Virgin Galactic's suborbital plane. Funk spent $200,000 on a ticket in 2010 and is still waiting for the opportunity to use it. She talks energetically and loudly, and you have to speak up if you want her to hear you, thanks to a lifetime spent near plane engines. She is unlike anyone I have ever met.