Giffords's husband to fly on space shuttle

Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of the U.S. congresswoman who was shot in the head in January, has confirmed he will resume command of the space shuttle Endeavour's last mission in April.

Kelly said at a NASA news conference Friday that he thought carefully about what his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, would want before deciding whether to head back into space.

"I know her very well," he said. "And she would be very comfortable with the decision that I made."

Liftoff is scheduled for April 19.

Kelly took a leave from training after his wife was shot in the head outside a Tucson, Ariz., supermarket as she met with constituents on Jan. 8. Six people were killed and 13 were injured in the rampage. A 22-year-old suspect is in custody.

Immediately after the shooting, Kelly thought his wife might remain in intensive care for months, he recalled. Doctors warned him that she would likely have a number of setbacks, but that never happened, he said.

In fact, she was recently transferred to a rehabilitation facility in Houston, where she is undergoing intensive therapy all day, seven days a week, Kelly said.

The fact that she is so busy in therapy played a big role in his decision, he added.

He would not provide details about Giffords's condition, but said that her doctors are impressed with her progress: "She improves every day."

Peggy Whitson, chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, said she carefully considered the implications of Kelly's return when he first proposed it over a week ago.

NASA had named a backup commander for the mission, Rick Sturckow, so the crew and support teams could train while Kelly was away caring for his wife.

But "it's still better to choose the fellow who has been training for the last year and half," Whitson said.

Brent Jett, chief of NASA's flight crew operation directorate, said Kelly had a very good plan for how he would commit the time necessary to train.

Jett asked him to put it in place for the past week, and his supervisors observed how he coped with both the training and spending the time away from his wife.

Whitson said NASA is now confident in Kelly's ability to lead the mission.

Endeavour delays mean more training time

He is to resume formal training on Monday.

When asked about the training that he missed, Kelly noted that the Endeavour mission has been delayed twice in the past few months – first from February to April and then from early April to later in the month, so training has not been very busy.

Kelly has flown three times aboard space shuttles; April's trip to the International Space Station will be his fourth. He will lead a veteran, all-male, American-Italian crew.

The mission already was set to be one of the highest profile shuttle flights ever. It will be Endeavour's last voyage and the next-to-last for the entire 30-year shuttle program, and will feature the delivery of an elaborate physics experiment by a Nobel prize winner.

Kelly's mission originally was scheduled for last July, but was bumped into 2011 because the experiment wasn't ready.

With Kelly back on board, the launch will "get the same kind of attention that the (1998) John Glenn mission" received, said Howard McCurdy, a public policy professor and space expert at American University in Washington, D.C.

Sense of normalcy

McCurdy suggested the public will embrace Kelly's decision, because it provides a sense of normalcy.

"We all want her to go back to Congress; we'd like them both to continue their careers and we'd like them to be whole and normal as if this thing had never happened," said McCurdy, author of the book Space and the American Imagination.

In an interview from the space station Wednesday, Mark Kelly's twin brother and fellow astronaut Scott Kelly said both he and his brother were trained in the Navy as high-performance pilots, and that enables them to put their personal lives aside, when necessary, to focus on the job at hand.

"My brother certainly is very good at that," he told The Associated Press. "If he does choose, and NASA management chooses, for him to fly this mission, I am absolutely 100 per cent confident that he will have no problem fulfilling his responsibilities the same way as if this incident would have never occurred."

Scott Kelly will be back on Earth by the time his brother flies. He's due to land in a Russian Soyuz capsule in mid-March, closing out a 5½-month mission.