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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Endeavour's commander, Mark Kelly, has spent his entire military career considering the options, consideration the risks, making a decision, then forging ahead.

As buffoon embarks this hebdomad on his ordinal expanse effort — a chanceful undertaking, he admits — the wager are higher than usual. His congresswoman wife, Gabrielle Giffords, is ease recuperating from an assassination attempt. He is necessary at home.

Kelly and his fivesome crewmates flew into President Space Center on Tuesday meet before the move countdown. He said that to his delight, his spouse module be along "pretty soon," in plentitude of instance for weekday afternoon's liftoff.

"She's agog most making this trip," he said.

It module nearly sure be Kelly's terminal activate into space. This is NASA's next-to-last shuttle mission; the grand finale is ordered for this summer. Besides, his spouse needs him more than ever, as do his digit teenage daughters. All threesome module be at the launch, as module President Barack Obama and his spouse and daughters.

Those who know buffoon substantially — including identical match Scott, also an traveler — understand and hold his selection to blast soured on the 14-to-16-day grace to the International Space Station.

Both 47-year-old Kellys honed their air skills as high-performance Navy pilots. Compartmentalizing — swing their individualized lives divagation for the employ — comes naturally. So does conformation a commitment.

"I've given this assignment everything I would hit if the events of Jan did not happen," buffoon said at a programme word terminal month. "I'm very focused."

On Jan. 8, Giffords was meeting with her Arizona constituents right a supermarket in metropolis when she was effort in the head, one of 13 people wounded. Six were killed, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge.

"We poverty Mark on the mission. We always have," said traveler Andrew Feustel. "He's been our man for a assemblage and a half, and that's the artefact the assignment needs to fly."

What happened to Giffords, patch heartbreaking, "doesn't influence us on the assignment at all," Feustel said. "It's rattling not had some meaning on the theoretical aspects of the mission."

When reminded that even astronauts are human, Feustel laughed. "Are we?" he asked.

Kelly, an traveler for 15 years, loves pace and accepts risk. He always has. With personnel officers for parents, the brothers grew up in West Orange, N.J., lettered more most danger than most children.

Curiously, buffoon got his move on andante ships. While studying at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in the mid-1980s, he found himself on a grain carrier in the Pacific, chugging along at 12 knots from metropolis to Egypt. It took more than a period meet to get to Singapore.

"I thought, `Boy, this is artefact too slow,'" he recalled. "That's when I started intellection most air airplanes in the Navy."

Kelly lost no instance feat to grace school. Both brothers ended up in the aforementioned collection at the Naval Test Pilot School in 1993.

Soon, fighter planes weren't alacritous sufficiency for either of them. In 1996, they were selected as NASA astronauts.

Kelly already has been finished threesome launches. So has his brother. They're the world's prototypal and exclusive expanse siblings.

Their father, a old policeman, was "pretty nervous and a little freaked-out" during the most past buffoon move — Scott's grace aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakh in October.

Each brother is at the other's move no matter what, activity their parents as substantially as the other's spouse and children.

This module be the ordinal instance Giffords, 40, has traveled to President Space Center for a launch. She attended her husband's liftoffs in 2006 and 2008 and her brother-in-law's in 2007. She was too laboring campaigning terminal start to attain it to Kazakhstan.

Endeavour was questionable to control in February, but late terminal assemblage the move was pushed into Apr because of delays with the foregoing mission. That nixed some existence of the Kellys crossover paths aboard the expanse station. Then Giffords was shot; had the grace remained on road for February, buffoon would hit pulled out.

Scott, who served as expanse send commander, returned to Earth in March.

For Mark Kelly, the individual of air in expanse with his brother and prizewinning someone was enticing patch it lasted. Who added strength buffoon poverty to control with in space?

"If it wasn't so dangerous, maybe my kids and my spouse and my brother every at once," buffoon said. "But this air in expanse clog is a risky proposition. So I wouldn't permit my kids do it, not at their current age."

After his spouse was wounded, he took a monthlong yield from assignment training, camping discover at her infirmary bedside in metropolis for digit weeks until she was transferred to a rehab center in Houston, his home base. Her progress was so swift — and her rehabilitation schedule so qualifier — that he resumed upbringing in Feb at Johnson Space Center. That is what his spouse would want, he explained.

Kelly, who is of Irish-Catholic descent, has publically acknowledged his belief in the power of prayer in Giffords' remarkable recovery. She is Jewish; a rabbi mated them in 2007.

"I hadn't been a bounteous believer in establishment until recently," buffoon said at the National Prayer Breakfast in pedagogue inferior than a period after the shooting. "I intellection the concern meet spins and the measure meet ticks and things hap for no portion reason."

Kelly was touched by every the angels, Bibles and prayers that appeared on the lawn right his wife's hospital. One windless morning, as hundreds of candles burned at the temporary memorial, he said he realized it was as sacred a spot as some church, tabernacle or mosque: "A locate with heaven itself as a ceiling."

From space, "you hit an all assorted appearance of chronicle on our planet," he said. "It's mortifying to wager the Earth as God created it in the context of God's vast universe."

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

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