I was very excited to be invited to speak to Kay Burley on the Sky News breakfast show on Tuesday July 20th for the buildup to the launch of the Blue Origin capsule into space. Onboard were Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, along with a young man Oliver who paid for a seat on the flight (interestingly, the person who got the winning bid of $28 million for that seat has postponed their flight because of ‘scheduling difficulties’), but I was most excited to see Wally Funk there too. She has now become the oldest astronaut, at 82, surpassing the previous record of John Glenn who went to the ISS aged 77. This is especially exciting because Wally trained alongside John back in the 1960s when NASA were figuring out who to send into space first. Despite Wally, and many other women as part of the ‘Mercury 13’, passing all the same tests as the men, NASA decided that they would cancel the women’s programme, and the rest is history, as they say. American women didn’t go into space until much later, but of course the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova in 1963! So it’s just amazing to see Wally complete her flight now, all these years later, and finally beat John at something again. (It’s well known that she performed better than him at some of the tests they had to complete at NASA). Anyway, congratulations to everyone at Blue Origin, it was a fantastic event to watch.