Tucson Tragedy

HOUSTON - He is bound for a place where gravity cannot contain him, but even in space, Mark Kelly will feel an inescapable pull toward home.

Gabby.

The pull brings him each morning to a room decorated with balloons and cards, desert scenes and family photos. He arrives, Starbucks cup in hand, to read the newspaper with his wife.

They begin every day this way, at the rehabilitation hospital where she is recovering from the moment that changed their world Jan. 8. The pull brings him back each night, long after dark. Another day's progress, another day closer.

In the hours between visits, there is another pull.

Kelly, a space-shuttle astronaut, races a clock that is counting down to launch day. On Friday, he and his crew will lift off aboard Endeavour for the second-to-last shuttle flight.

As they run through the training they will depend on to stay alive in space, the countdown continues.

Another day closer.

Kelly has been to space before. But the job "will be a little bit harder this time, just because I want to look out for her," Kelly said, speaking to The Arizona Republic in an exclusive interview after spending a day in training and an evening at his wife's side.

Kelly says launch mornings are tightly focused. Hurried, but precise to the second, the tension broken only by a preflight poker game. The astronauts think only about the launch.

This time, he says, will be different.

"I know I'm going to have this sense of wanting to get back, just to be with her," he said.

NASA tells the astronauts they would have been safer rushing the beaches of Normandy. Tragedy has claimed a shuttle twice in the past. The chances are one in 57 that an astronaut will die.

Kelly's wife, Arizona's Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, has outrun long odds of her own, her doctors say. She survived the bullet that traveled through her brain when she was shot outside a grocery store near Tucson.

In the days after her shooting, Kelly wondered whether he could lead the mission. He was being pulled to Gabby.

Then he watched his wife begin her recovery. Somewhere among her words, in their moments together, was a clear message for her husband, one that eased the struggle against the pull. It was the same answer astronauts wait to hear in the long buildup to a launch, after the risks and the rewards have been assessed. It was the answer, in NASA-speak, to the question "Go or no-go?"

The answer was go.

***

Morning at Giffords' hospital room brings husband Kelly, carrying a brightly colored paper cup and a copy of the New York Times.

Since she was moved to TIRR Memorial Hermann in Houston in late January, she has worked on her recovery full time, while Kelly trains at Johnson Space Center nearby.

Kelly visits her about 7 a.m. for 15 minutes, maybe 30, as many as he can squeeze in before work.

He takes her drink order each night before. "It's either a non-fat latte with two raw sugars, or tea," he says. "And I always ask her if she wants a doughnut, because once she said yes."
At his usual Starbucks, workers make the order with specially decorated cups.

While he waits in line for the coffee, he scans the front page of the Times and chooses a story he can read aloud to her. He finds stories he knows she would like, the ones about Congress, the budget or people doing good things.

It was from a Times story they were reading together that Giffords first learned that six people died in the shooting that wounded her. Kelly tried to skip a couple of lines in a story, but Giffords, following along, caught him. When she realized the truth, she began to cry.

Lately, the conversation has turned to his launch. Giffords wants to go to Florida to see the liftoff, something she makes clear to him. They are awaiting her doctors' OK.

Kelly the astronaut wants her in Florida. "I wouldn't want her to be there if she wasn't ready to do this,"

Kelly said. "She's one of the biggest supporters in Congress of what we do at NASA."

But as her husband, he says, he wants the best thing for her recovery. If she weren't there, he says, "it wouldn't be the end of the world either."

***

In the hours and days after the Tucson tragedy, Kelly wasn't sure he would ever be where he is now.

He rushed to his wife's side after hearing the news: A lone gunman had opened fire at one of Giffords' trademark meet-and-greet events. Six people died, including a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and one of Giffords' staff members. Thirteen others were wounded.

Kelly had already been preparing for his shuttle mission. It would be his fourth, his second as commander.

It carried special meaning as one of the last flights in the shuttle's often-turbulent history.

Then Giffords' chief of staff had called him with the incomprehensible news. Gabby had been shot.
In those seconds, he wondered if he had dreamed the phone call. Then, he says, he found himself wishing his wife had lost her re-election race.

The race had been close, so close the results weren't known for days. The result could have gone the other way.

"That doesn't mean that this wouldn't have happened," he said. "I mean I don't . . . you don't know this guy's motivation, but I think there's a chance it would not have happened. Probably, I think there's a good chance that if she would have lost, this would not have happened."

For days, the question hung over Tucson and then Houston: Would Kelly fly the mission or would he remain with his wife?

Television commentators, columnists and bloggers all disagreed about what was right. He has a duty to his crew, some argued. He has a duty to his wife, others said.

Kelly talked about the dilemma with Peter Rhee, the trauma surgeon at University Medical Center in Tucson, where Giffords was taken after the shooting.

"He has been working on this mission for over two years," Rhee said in an interview with The Republic.

"He had been the consummate husband and wanted to cancel that mission. He wanted to give the best opportunity for his crew to have a concentrated commander on that mission."
Rhee tried to reassure Kelly that Giffords would be fine, and he was touched by Kelly's deep concern. "I think that he is one of the nicest men I ever met," Rhee said.

Kelly talked with his twin brother, Scott, who is also an astronaut. Scott was aboard the International Space Station on the day of the shooting.

"Certainly it would be a tough decision for anyone," Scott said. "I think we just discussed the two options. In NASA-speak, the 'risk traits' of doing anything."

Given Mark's experience, Scott said, "It's something he can manage."

Kelly also talked to his wife.

"Her reaction," he says, "was just like kind of confusion that I would even consider giving up the opportunity to command this last flight of Endeavour."

At every step, he says, the answer is the same.

"I've asked a number of times, 'Are you OK with me doing this?' " he says. "She'll say, 'Yes.' "

***

At NASA in Houston, Kelly jogs down the hallway, his crew speed-walking behind him.

The flight session is at 8 a.m. For Kelly, 8 means 8, not 8:01.

"Up, up, we're late," he says, waving his arm and herding them up the stairs into the shuttle-flight simulator, where they strap into a replica of the shuttle's cockpit. The crew members wear blue rubber bracelets that read: "Peace, Love, Gabby." They don't ask how she is doing, and Kelly doesn't bring it up.

They run through every step of the mission, down to the violent shaking they feel upon ascent and even the moment that they pause to take photographs of Earth.

Before each practice launch, pilot Gregory H. "Boxy" Johnson reaches his hand behind him, palm up, and wiggles his fingers for fist bumps from mission specialists Roberto Vittori and Michael Fincke. He calls them "Ricky Bobby" and "Spanky."

Kelly sits to Johnson's left. He doesn't have a nickname.

"That's how he rolls," Johnson said.

And he doesn't fist-bump in the simulator.

"I'll probably get one out of him," Johnson said, "and I don't want to waste it."

For the simulator flights, a NASA team writes training exercises, creating unexpected events to test the crew and Mission Control.
Today, during one of their final simulations, their trainers make things fall apart.

The crew and controllers must work together to diagnose the malfunctions - failed engines, loss of communication - and preserve the mission.

Fully 15 things go wrong in the ascent - "one failure away from going hot," a crew member says.
They make it to space.

In real life, Kelly says, they'd maybe have one problem.

After the simulation, during the debriefing, they talk about risk and worth, if that flight should have been aborted "to keep us alive," Johnson said.

He questioned Mission Control: "You see what we're getting at? We want to be intact."

***

For all the emotional weight Endeavour will carry into space, its true payload is a $1.5 billion experiment that many scientists believe could help unlock the mysteries of what makes up our universe.

The alpha magnetic spectrometer will be mounted to the space station and, if all goes well, will collect data for the next decade or longer, analyzing bits of cosmic material, looking for clues about the big bang and the dark matter that makes up most of space. It has been compared in importance to the Hubble Space Telescope.

"That's unique," Kelly said. "It's the only large sensor that goes on the outside of the space station. It's more expensive than Hubble, the most expensive thing ever flown in the space shuttle."

The experiment is the work of nearly 600 scientists and researchers from 16 countries and 60 different institutions.

"We're going to be able to follow the science over the next years and next decades and see what comes out of this," he said. "Knowing that you're a part of that makes this flight compared to my other three pretty special."

The spectrometer almost didn't make a flight. After the shuttle Columbia blew up on re-entry in 2003, NASA dropped the experiment from its newly shortened schedule. But the Nobel-winning scientist behind the project lobbied Congress, and NASA finally ordered an extra flight to carry the experiment aloft.

***

Mark Kelly is playing a kind of game.

Write down a number on a piece of paper, he tells a reporter, a number between one and 57.

"I'm not going to look," he says. "Write it down. I'm looking over here. Have you written it down?"

Kelly's game is a way of illustrating the odds NASA puts on an astronaut dying - one in 57.

Kelly was accepted into the space program in 1996, 10 years after the first shuttle tragedy, when Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. He flew his first mission in 2001 and his second in 2006, before and after the Columbia disaster.

He knows the risks.

When Giffords tells him she's worried, he says, "I would tell her that there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong with the space shuttle, but there's a lot of stuff that we have control over. There are a lot of things I can do to intervene and make the situation a lot better. And then there's stuff completely out of our control."

The number is written on the piece of paper. Now, Kelly tries to guess it.

"Thirty-seven," he says, with a hint of glee.

The number on the paper is 34.

Kelly's grin broadens.

"See, I won," he says.

So what happens if the number had been 37?

"I would have said, 'I'm dead.' "

***

On the morning of the launch, Kelly will leave four handwritten letters on his desk in crew quarters.

He will write letters to each of his daughters, Claudia and Claire, a "long list of things" for his brother and a message more tender for his wife.

The letters will be delivered only if tragedy intervenes. His brother will be in charge of handing them out.

The writing is not a pleasant exercise: "I don't like to do it," Kelly said.

Like most astronaut spouses, Giffords has written her own letters to Kelly, to be read once he reaches orbit.

The last time was in 2008. For that launch, she talked about the letters in an interview with The Republic.

"I told him how much I love him and how proud I am of him," she said at the time.

She also said that on an earlier flight, she had cheated. She opened the letter he wrote her.

"I did," she said. "I will again."

***

STS-134 is Kelly's last shuttle mission, Endeavour's last and NASA's second-to-last. With American space travel in budgetary peril, Kelly can't be sure he'll return to space.

When Endeavour returns to Earth in May, Kelly will face decisions about his future. They will not be the regimented decisions of an astronaut in training. The future is not a question of go or no-go.

"I've been so focused on helping Gabby and getting ready for this flight," he said. "I know when I get back I'll take my time and figure out what's next for me."

With so much time and so many political pundits to speculate, there have been suggestions he might run for office, perhaps taking his wife's place if she chooses not to run again someday.
He spends little time with such ideas.

"Run for what?" he said. "I'm registered to vote in Texas. I have no idea what my future is going to be. I've got this flight that I've got to successfully execute, and then I'll think about what's next."

What's next is focusing on Gabby. Her future is as unwritten as his. Her doctors and her friends and associates talk about her recovery in terms of weeks, months. They refuse to commit her to any schedule that isn't of her own doing.

She could continue her recovery in Texas or in Washington or back home, where she used to wind through the Catalina foothills on her bike.

For now, they focus on the space flight ahead.

Kelly can call Giffords 38 hours into the mission, when the shuttle docks at the International Space Station and the hatch is opened. There will be a long delay on the line, but for a few minutes each day there will be each other's voice, transcending the atmosphere.

The conversations "will be different now than they were on my last flight," said Kelly, who commanded the shuttle Discovery in 2008. On "one of my last calls to her from space, she was walking from the Capitol back over to Rayburn (House Office Building) with Miles O'Brien from CNN."

Now, he will ask her "how things are going and how she's doing and what's her day like," he said.

They have a particular phone goodbye, the rote of a married couple, he says.

"But that's a secret."

***

The end of the workday brings Kelly back to the hospital room. It is past dark.

He watches for small signs of improvement, to see that something has changed, something new that

wasn't there a day earlier.

Most days, he says, he is rewarded.

If this were a previous mission, he would be talking to her about the preparations.

"I'd talk to her about all the crap I gotta deal with and all the issues I have to deal with," he says. "I'm not doing that so much anymore. I mean I could; I just don't really want to burden her with my problems. I try to focus more on what she's having to deal with."

The first time they felt a connection after the tragedy came in a different hospital room, one in Tucson, just hours after she was shot.

She found his hand with hers and reached for his wedding ring. Kelly will never forget it.

"She pulled my ring off my finger," he says, "and started flipping it from one finger to the next."

This week, the connection will come from her wedding ring.

He will carry it with him into space, just as he did the last flight, tucked into a pocket of his jumpsuit. The ring is inscribed: "You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be."

He worries about what she'll do at night while he's gone.

"It's just she'll be sad that I'm not there anymore every night," he says. "I mean, it's just that."

At night, in Houston, he simply looks forward to seeing his wife. Before he leaves for the night, he sometimes crawls into bed alongside her - close, once again, to his center of gravity.