posted 11-14-2011 01:03 PM               

Just before noon on April 29, 2011, Mark Kelly stood in his orange launch suit and waved at the crowd of reporters around him. He was beside the silver Airstream called the Astrovan, which would carry him and his five crewmates to the shuttle Endeavour, boiling away on the nearby pad.

If there was such a thing as just another astronaut, he was no longer it. He had been thrust into a different American spotlight four months earlier, when his wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, was shot in the head outside a grocery store in Tucson. His already extraordinary life had been made even more singular by the introduction of a radical particle named Jared Lee Loughner.

Now as much as everything else that Kelly was, he had become the husband of a woman made famous for having somehow survived a bullet's passing through her brain. And right alongside her, he had become the embodiment of American hope against very long odds...