When Wally Funk was 5, she donned a Superman cape and leaped from the roof of her family’s barn in New Mexico, dreaming of flight and landing in a haystack.

She decorated her bedroom ceiling with model planes, earned her pilot’s license as a teenager and began a six-decade journey to space at age 22, joining a private program in 1961 that tested whether the country’s finest female pilots could become astronauts.