The 82-year-old pilot will accompany Jeff Bezos on his flight into space

The 82-year-old US pilot Wally Funk will accompany Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on his flight into space in two and a half weeks - and thus travel into space as the oldest person in history. Funk will take part as a guest of honor on the first manned flight of Bezos' space project Blue Origin into space on July 20, the company announced. "I can hardly wait," said Funk laughing in a video that Bezos published on Instagram. When asked by the richest person in the world what she will say when she returns to earth, the 82-year-old replies: "I'll say: honey, this is the best thing that has ever happened to me." Funk had already wanted to fly into space as a young woman: In the 1960s, she took part in the privately funded program "Woman in Space", in which female pilots, like Blue Origin, were tested for their fitness as astronauts explained. The women, later known as "Mercury 13", went through the same tests as the astronauts on the NASA Mercury mission, but never flew into space. Funk was the youngest graduate of the program. "They told me I did better and got the job done faster than any of the guys," she said in the Blue Origin video. She kept reporting to NASA, but was never accepted as an astronaut. For this, she became the first woman inspector of the US aviation authority FAA and the first woman investigator of the accident investigation authority NTSB, as Blue Origin explained.