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Wally Funk, the 82-year-old female space pioneer, is finally heading for space after Amazon-billionaire Jeff Bezos invited her to join him on a flight into space.

Aerospace company Blue Origin, owned by Bezos, is making it first flight into space carrying humans at the end of July and have now added Wally Funk to the crew as an "honoured guest".

Jeff Bezos welcomed her to the crew, saying he was, "excited to have you fly with us."

Mary "Wally" Funk has been involved in flying ever since becoming the first female flight instructor at a US military base the age of 20. She went on to become the first female Air Safety Investigator in the United States as well.

In short, she broke down lots of barriers for women who wanted to get involved in flying. That included beginning the fight to get women into space.

In 1961, Funk volunteered for the 'Women in Space' programme that was being carried out by William Lovelace, who had put together the testing programme for Nasa's male astronauts.

While the scheme had the support of Nasa and the US government, Lovelace actually had to run the scheme himself, with financial support from Jacqueline Cochrane - a female pilot who had been the first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953.

The scheme was known as the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, or, FLATs.

The tests involved physical examinations, to see how a female body would handle the stresses of going into space, and psychological examinations to see how the volunteers would handle the isolation of space flight, or how their personalities would handle the challenges.

There was also a third stage involving flight simulation, but only one volunteer was able to complete all three stages. That was because the government wouldn't allow military equipment to be used in the scheme, which meant the FLATs scheme had to be cancelled.

In 1963, after the FLATs programme was closed, a Russian woman called Valentina Tereshkova became the first to travel into space.

Nasa finally started considering women for space in 1976, and in 1983 Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.

Female astronauts have now piloted flights into space, piloted the International Space Station and carried out space walks. In 2020, Nasa announced a plan to return to the Moon, with nine female candidates on the list of potential crew members.

For pioneers like Wally Funk, space flight seemed a distant dream but now, at the age of 82, Funk should finally get the chance to go into space. Being picked for the flight is something she described to Jeff Bezos as, "the best thing that ever happened to me!"