For each of the previous times he went into space on NASA’s shuttle, astronaut Mark Kelly took with him his wife’s wedding ring. But this time, as he captained the penultimate flight of the Endeavor, the U.S. representative from Arizona asked if he could leave his ring back on Earth, with her. She wore it on a chain around her neck as she watched this morning’s launch from a wheelchair in the Kennedy Space Center. And somewhere up on the shuttle, there’s a note that Giffords — who is in the midst of a long and painstaking recovery after receiving a bullet wound to the brain in January — handwrote to her husband. She’ll later speak to him by videoconference, and she gets to pick a couple of wake-up songs for the shuttle’s crew. “Good stuff,” she reportedly said once the shuttle was safely in flight. “Good stuff.”
Gabrielle Giffords: Shuttle Launch Was ‘Good Stuff’ [HuffPo]
