History will be made on July 20 when Mary Wallace Funk, at age 82, becomes the oldest person to go to space.

Despite a long and prestigious aerospace career, Funk has never made a journey to space. She will blast off with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in his scheduled 11-minute ride aboard the New Shepard rocket.

On Thursday, Bezos announced on Instagram that Funk would join him and his brother Mark in the voyage.

Funk, a graduate of the 1960’s Woman in Space Program, was invited as an honored guest due to her many impressive contributions over the past 60 years. It fulfills her long-time dream.

“I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up,” she said.

She goes by Wally, short for her last name Wallace. The daughter of parents who owned a variety store, Funk was born on February 1, 1939, in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Since she was young, Funk was always fascinated by planes. As a 1-year-old, her parents took her to a nearby airport. She got right up to an airliner, a Douglas DC-3.

"I got right to the wheel and I try to turn the nut," Funk said.

“She’s going to fly," Funk's mother said in a Guardian profile.

In high school, Funk wanted to take mechanical drawing classes but was denied because she was a girl. It served as a life lesson for her to overcome obstacles.

She enrolled at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where she joined her first air club "Flying Susies." Funk was rated first in her class of 24 fliers. She later graduated with her pilot's license in 1958 along with an Associate of Arts degree.

She then moved to Oklahoma State University for her Bachelor of Science degree, but the real attraction to the school was their famous "Flying Angies" program. In college, she received a number of aviation instruction ratings, including her Commercial, Single-engine Land, Multi-engine Land, Single-engine Sea, Instrument, Flight Instructor's, and all Ground Instructor's ratings. Along with becoming the elected officer of Flying Angies.

She received the "Outstanding Female Pilot" trophy, the "Flying Aggie Top Pilot" and the "Alfred Alder Memorial Trophy."

Funk has a long list of professional accomplishments. She was the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, the first female civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the first female Federal Aviation Agency inspector.

In Bezos' Instagram video, she said she has logged 19,600 hours of flight time and taught more than 3,000 people to fly, during her experience as a pioneer in aviation.

“Everything that the FAA has, I’ve got the license for," Funk says in the video. “And, I can outrun you!”

Including her time as one of the Mercury 13 women, who went through astronaut training by a team of aviation medical experts for NASA in the 1960s. The same training that the men went through but this was during a time when NASA astronauts were all male.

They were not able to make it to space or any type of NASA astronaut corps. She was the youngest member of Mercury 13.

“These fearless pilots had all the qualifications and experience to be able to compete with — and in some cases, outperform — their male counterparts. They were simply the wrong gender,” Space.com noted of Mercury 13.

“Nothing has ever gotten in my way,” Funk said. “They said, ‘Well, you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’ I said, ’Guess what doesn’t matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it and I like to do things that nobody has ever done.”

“No one has waited longer,” Bezos said on Instagram.

“It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally. We’re excited to have you fly with us on July 20th as our honored guest.”

In the video, Bezos asks Funk, “We open the hatch and you step outside -- what’s the first thing you say?”

“I will say, 'Honey, that’s the best thing that ever happened to me!” Funk replied.

Then she gave Bezos a big hug.