Sixty years after joining a private program with the hope of one day becoming an astronaut, US pilot Wally Funk will finally see her dream come true at age 82.

On Thursday, Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos invited her to join him on his spaceflight company Blue Origin's July 20 launch.

The flight will not just make her the oldest person ever to travel in space, but also a walking, breathing symbol of the rewards of audacity and perseverance.

"I like to do things that nobody's ever done," she said in a video posted on Instagram by Bezos.

Mercury 13

Funk grew up in the western United States in Taos, New Mexico. As a child she was passionate about aviation and took her first flying lesson at age nine. In high school, she was barred from taking mechanics, a subject reserved for boys.

Such rules did not prevent her from obtaining a pilot's license and graduating from Oklahoma State University, known for its aviation program. By now she has logged 19,600 hours of flight time.

At the very beginning of the 1960s she joined a privately-funded, innovative flight program called Mercury 13—which put women through the same training and tests as the male astronauts undergoing the official NASA program.

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying 36 UK telecommunication and internet satellites blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia's Far East on Thursday, the Roscosmos space agency said.

Images released by Roscosmos showed the Soyuz rocket, launched by Europe's Arianespace, taking off against dark skies at 1248 GMT.

"We have lift-off," OneWeb, a London-headquartered company, said on Twitter.

OneWeb is working to complete the construction of a constellation of low earth orbit satellites providing enhanced broadband and other services to countries around the world.

The company is competing against billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in the race to provide fast internet for the world's remote areas via satellites.

The UK company plans for its global commercial internet service to be operational by next year, supported by some 650 satellites.

Arianespace, which has worked with Russia for close to two decades, is under contract to make 16 Soyuz launches between December 2020 and the end of 2022.

This year launches of 36 satellites took place in March, April and May.

"Taking our constellation to a total of 254 satellites, this launch will allow us to provide complete coverage north of 50 degrees latitude by the end of the 2021," OneWeb said.