82-year old woman to travel to space with Jeff Bezos

Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk (82) on the first crewed flight into space from his rocket company identified as Blue Origin.

The woman Wally Funk will be the oldest person ever to travel into space.

"I didn't think I'd ever get to go up," Funk said in a video interview posted on the company's website.

Funk was 21-year-old pilot and the youngest of the 13 women who passed the rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA's program that first sent Americans into space between 1961 and 1963. However, later she was denied the chance to become astronauts because of gender discrimination.

In addition, she was the first female flight instructor at a US military base and the first woman to become an air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.

She is due to join Bezos's brother, Mark, and the winner of an auction aboard the New Shepard rocket as it ascends more than 62 miles (100 km) above Earth into suborbital space.

Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet. He has been vying with fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson to become the first to travel into space on a privately developed rocket.