Gabby

by Gabrielle Giffords

  In the wake of Columbia, I had a hard time fully reassuring my daughters that everything would be OK. Though thousands of good and talented people played a role in each shuttle flight, each astronaut was at the mercy of a million decisions. My girls intuitively knew this.

  Claudia, my older daughter, then nine years old, was especially adamant. She begged me to quit the astronaut program. She knew Laurel Clark well through astronaut family gatherings, and was friends with Laurel’s son, Ian. “That could easily have been you on that mission,” she said. “I could be like Ian, the one without a parent!”

  “NASA is fixing this problem,” I’d say, and that was true. But we all knew there was no way to make the shuttle fail-safe.

  I did my best to speak honestly and directly to my kids. The shuttle is a complex machine with hundreds of thousands of parts. It operates near the limit of what humans have been able to engineer. “Design changes are going to help stop the shedding of foam from the tank, so what happened to Columbia is far less likely to happen again,” I told them. “I know I’m in a risky business, but sometimes we have to take risks in life, because the rewards are so big. Those of us who are astronauts, that’s how we feel about the importance of space exploration.”

  For a while, I thought about the Columbia disaster every single day. Now, maybe it comes into my head a couple times a week.

  Gabby knew when she met me that there were dangers in my line of work, from my thirty-nine combat missions in the Navy to my missions into space. And though she accepted the anxiety that comes with being an astronaut’s spouse, she also felt a need to be proactive. As ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, she held hearings on flight safety, focusing not just on NASA but also on the commercial rocket companies now gearing up to deliver astronauts into space.

  Gabby began one of her hearings by saying, “I am under no illusion that human spaceflight can ever be made risk-free. Nothing in life is . . . But this subcommittee is holding today’s hearing because we need to be sure that any decisions being contemplated by the White House and Congress are informed by our best understanding of the fundamental crew-safety issues facing our human spaceflight program. And in making those decisions, we should not let either advocacy or unexamined optimism replace probing questions and thoughtful analysis.”

  It’s ironic. When Gabby was elected to Congress, we didn’t consider that she was the one with the risky job, or that she’d be the one nearly losing her life while serving her country. We never imagined that it could be Gabby who’d draw the ace of spades.

  My maiden mission into space was as the pilot of Endeavour in December 2001. It was the first shuttle flight after the September 11 attacks, and we were told that security was higher than at any time in NASA history.

  The U.S. government was so concerned about a terrorist’s aircraft flying into the space shuttle on the launchpad that it allegedly positioned antiaircraft artillery around the Kennedy Space Center. At least, that was the word that leaked out from government sources. It wasn’t until years later that I found out there were no antiaircraft guns. It was just misinformation. Tricky but effective. We were all fooled.

  That’s not to say there wasn’t tight security. Guards with automatic rifles escorted us when we departed for the pad. On the road, we passed a Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun. During the countdown, fighter jets and helicopter gunships were on patrol.

  It was a time of high emotion for the country, of course. We’d carry with us six thousand postcard-size flags, which would be distributed after our flight to the relatives of 9/11 victims, and to some survivors of the attacks. (There aren’t many things that have left the planet and safely returned. From the Mercury program to today it has been a tradition to take items into space that can be given away as mementos. People collect and treasure these keepsakes.)

  We also brought along a flag that had flown at the World Trade Center on September 11. It was torn and still smelled of smoke. We worried that unpacking it in space might actually trigger smoke alarms.

  Our commander, Dom Gorie, spoke beautifully for all of us just before we launched. He saw a vital message in that ripped flag. “Just like our country, it’s a little bit bruised and battered and torn,” he said. “With a little repair, it’s going to fly as high and as beautiful as it ever did, and that’s just what our country is doing.”

  I was able to mostly put the possibilities of terrorism out of my head. But because it would be my first flight, I couldn’t fully shake my feelings of anxious uncertainty about what was ahead. Most every sensation on my journey, from liftoff to long-term weightlessness to reentry, would be new to me. What would it really feel like once I was sitting atop 500,000 gallons of rocket fuel, waiting to go?

  My brother had beaten me into space—his first mission was in 1999—and before my liftoff he warned me about the first two minutes of flight. He said there’s no real way to describe what it would be like. “You’ll feel like maybe something is going very wrong,” he warned. “You’ll feel every pound of thrust. It’s full power, instantaneously.”

  On the day of the flight, when I was strapped into my seat on the space shuttle, at first I was just hyperfocused on my job. It takes three hours to turn everything on. Then, as the countdown clock approaches zero, things start to get really busy. At six seconds, the three shuttle main engines start producing about a half-million pounds of thrust each. At zero seconds, the solid rockets ignite, and with 7.5 million pounds of thrust you jump into the air. It is an amazing, wild ride that takes you from 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in just eight minutes and thirty seconds. The best way that I’ve been able to describe this experience to nonastronauts is to have them imagine being on a runaway train going down the tracks at 1,000 miles an hour. And it keeps getting faster.

  That mission lasted twelve days and orbited the earth 186 times. After we landed safely back at Kennedy Space Center, Scott was waiting to greet me on the runway, and my first words to him were, “Boy, you were right about liftoff !”

  My next flight was on July 4, 2006, the first time a crew had launched from this planet on Independence Day. It was the second “Return to Flight” mission after the loss of Columbia, so it was understandably nerve-wracking. Had NASA fully corrected the problems that led to Columbia’s destruction?

  Our mission brought thousands of pounds of supplies and a German astronaut to the International Space Station, but its primary purpose was to test new safety and repair procedures instituted in response to the failures that brought down Columbia. We did lose small pieces of foam during our launch—we knew that during the mission—but there was no significant damage to the orbiter. We traveled 5.5 million miles and landed without incident. The mission was deemed a great success because it gave NASA confidence in a new set of inspection and repair procedures.

  One fellow crew member on that mission was Lisa Nowak, who made news a year later because of her obsession with a fellow astronaut. Police said Lisa drove from Houston to Orlando, Florida, with a black wig, a BB pistol, pepper spray, rubber tubing, and a hooded trench coat to confront a woman the astronaut was dating. News reports said she had worn diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on her long trip; she later denied that was true. Lisa was charged with attempted kidnapping, spent two days in jail, and later pled guilty to lesser charges. She received one year of probation, and NASA terminated its association with her.

  It was an embarrassing occurrence that led to an independent panel reviewing the mental health of astronauts. Sometimes I wonder if I could have done something to help Lisa before she got herself into trouble. Those of us who knew her saw that she wasn’t doing well emotionally in the months leading up to the incident, and I wish I had talked to her about what was going on in her personal life. This episode reminded us that just as the machinery of the shuttle program was imperfect, so were we as astronauts.

  Gabby was my girlfriend when she attended the 2006 launch. By my next launch, on May 31, 2008, she was
my wife. With the exception of a fictional character in James Michener’s novel Space, Gabby was the first member of Congress in history to be married to a spacebound astronaut.

  When Discovery blasted off, Gabby was in the family viewing area, simultaneously gripping my mother’s arm and her mother’s hand. It took her a while before she exhaled.

  I had arranged for a friend from the astronaut office to present her with roses and a card, which reminded her that I loved her and that I’d see her again in two weeks. I instructed him not to deliver the flowers until Mission Control announced we were safely in orbit, just over eight minutes after liftoff. If the launch had gone awry, I didn’t want her holding my flowers and my card during a hard moment.

  Being married to me, Gabby saw both the soaring possibilities of space travel and the life-threatening challenges. She also saw that there was a dispiriting lack of vision inside NASA. The space shuttle era was ending, but in the increasingly rudderless space program, there was no clear consensus about what should follow. Gabby took a lot of her inside knowledge back to Congress.

  “What is most striking about the [NASA] budget is the lack of overall vision,” she said in a hearing, ten months before she was shot. “We went to the Moon with a vision of exploring our first heavenly body. We flew the shuttle and the International Space Station with the vision of living continuously in space. What is our vision now? Where will we go? How will we get there? And when will we go? It is simply unfair to ask the American people to hand over billions of dollars for something that isn’t even detailed enough to qualify for a loan from a loan shark.”

  Gabby knew well that the achievements of every generation of NASA astronauts and engineers were rooted in great risks. She knew that risk is often a necessary component of vision. I loved to talk to her about all of these issues. She understood.

  I do a lot of thinking now, comparing Gabby today to how she was before. Since her injury, the rest of us have been called upon to encourage her to walk those extra steps or to move her right hand or to find the right words in her head and to say them out loud. We’re constantly encouraging her. But before the shooting on January 8, it was Gabby who was the great encourager. She saw it as her job to encourage her staffers, her constituents, and her colleagues in Congress to be bold, to take risks, to think big. And that was especially true when she thought about the space program.

  One day in July 2009, Gabby was in the cloakroom, the gathering area for members of the House of Representatives. The Tyra Banks Show was playing on the television, and that annoyed her. She had nothing against the talk show, but it just seemed frivolous.

  “I switched the channel,” she told me later. “I put on NASA TV.”

  “Good choice!” I said.

  It was the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon, and NASA’s channel was offering a retrospective. “While we were between votes, I thought it would be nice if my fellow members were exposed to coverage of the anniversary, rather than just watching Tyra Banks,” she said. “Maybe they’d learn some things. Maybe they’d be inspired.”

  All around her in the cloakroom, representatives were socializing, eating snacks, or even napping. But Gabby was there on a mission, switching the TV channel and turning up the volume. Neil Armstrong was standing bravely on the Moon, and she wanted him to be heard.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Second Chances

  My daughters, Claudia and Claire, were very attentive to Gabby after she was injured. They sat by her bed and held her hand. They gave her hugs. They told her they loved her.

  I was touched to see their compassion and concern. You don’t always know how your kids will react in tough situations, and they made me proud.

  For Gabby, though, their affection was a different experience. In fact, it was so unexpected that it was almost disorienting for her. Before January 8, Gabby had tried her best to connect with my kids. Sometimes she was able to engage them. Often, she was not. They wouldn’t be rude. They just weren’t receptive.

  Gabby understood their reluctance about building a relationship with her. She was the stepmother, arriving in the girls’ lives after their mom and I had divorced. The divorce was amicable, but the girls didn’t need or want another mother figure. It’s a familiar story, of course, after a parent remarries.

  I understood how everyone was feeling. It was hard for Gabby. It was hard for Claudia and Claire. It was hard for me.

  I’d let the girls know that Gabby truly wanted to reach out to them. She was determined. “There’s nobody on the planet who asks about you more than Gabby does,” I’d tell them. “She asks about your school-work, your friends, your activities. She’s always asking.”

  The girls would just shrug when I said that.

  As they saw it, Gabby was busy with her career. She didn’t live in Houston or visit very often. How truly interested in their lives could she be? And because I’d travel to Tucson or Washington to be with Gabby, she was responsible for taking me away from the girls, who split their time between me and my ex.

  The events on January 8 changed everything.

  The girls were shaken up by the sheer violence of that day: six people dead, thirteen injured. It pained them to see me so distraught and emotional, especially early on. And they also felt great regret about their dealings with Gabby. They desperately wished they’d been more willing to give her a chance, but she was in a coma, unable to understand or acknowledge their apologies.

  Once Gabby started to heal and was more aware of her surroundings, the positive changes in the girls’ interactions with her were so pronounced that Gabby didn’t know what to make of them. She couldn’t articulate her thoughts, but sometimes she and I would make eye contact. Her look said it all, as if she had stepped into an alternate stepdaughter universe.

  As Gabby improved, she recognized that Claudia, sixteen, and Claire, fourteen, were trying hard to make up for lost time. But Gabby was in a different place, unable to talk to them about much of anything, feeling vulnerable and helpless, struggling with so many emotions. She still yearned for a child of her own, and knew that dream was now unlikely, given her injuries. She wondered if my kids had changed only because they felt sorry for her. In truth, their newfound affection and empathy made her uncomfortable. I sometimes had to ask the kids to back off, and that request, though carefully delivered, was hurtful to them.

  Meanwhile, through it all, Claudia kept in her purse a folded-up piece of paper that she read to herself several times a day. She wondered if she’d ever find the right moment, or the courage, to read it aloud to Gabby.

  Just as some employees at El Campo Tire didn’t know what to make of Gabby’s cheerful personality, neither did my kids. Claudia was especially suspicious.

  She used to keep her thoughts to herself. But after January 8, she talked through her feelings. “I always thought Gabby was fake,” she admitted. “She was so animated. No matter what you’d tell her, she’d have this warm smile on her face the entire time. I never knew if it was real.”

  As Claudia reached her teens, she almost never initiated a conversation with Gabby. If Gabby asked her something, she’d give a short, basic reply. Otherwise, she kept her stepmother at arm’s length.

  The girls were busy with school, friends, sports, and cheerleading. Gabby would ask them questions about their activities. Often it seemed they were answering only out of obligation.

  But Gabby was always looking for common ground. When Claudia said she was considering a run for student council president in eighth grade, Gabby lit up and immediately offered advice for the campaign.

  “You should run,” Gabby said. “You’d be great!”

  “I don’t know,” Claudia answered.

  “You’ll need to get your name out there. Tell everyone the positive things you’ll do for the school.”

  “Yeah, I’ll probably make some posters,” Claudia said.

  “Posters are good,” Gabby told her. “But you should also figure out what bugs
the kids.” She suggested that Claudia set herself up at a table during the lunch hour to interact with her fellow students. “They can tell you what’s on their minds, and you can talk about how you might help improve things.”

  “I don’t know,” Claudia said.

  “Think about it,” Gabby said. “It could really help you understand the kids at school. And once you’re president, you’ll be a better leader.”

  Gabby was enthusiastic, brainstorming about speeches Claudia could give, and ways she could turn lunchtime at the League City Intermediate School cafeteria into a miniature Congress on Your Corner.

  “I’m not sure I want to do that,” Claudia finally said. “I’ll probably just stick to the posters.”

  Claudia saw Gabby’s political spirit, but it all seemed too much for middle school. In the end, Claudia decided not to even run.

  Claudia and Claire understood that issues mattered to Gabby, but that could be annoying to them, too. As a conservationist, “Green Gabby” wasn’t happy when the girls stood for a while in front of the refrigerator with the door open, trying to decide what to eat. She’d playfully tell them, “You don’t need to keep the refrigerator door open that long.” They’d close the door and try to resist rolling their eyes.

  But Gabby was very conscientious about her impact, and ours, on the planet. We’d even discuss with the kids the man-made devastation I’d observed from space. From my first shuttle mission in 2001 to my last mission in 2011, I clearly saw the deforestation in the Amazon. By my last trip, there were many more big blotches of nothing. Gabby understood how troubling this was, and couldn’t resist reminding the kids of how we all need to do our part to save the environment. She’d say, “Don’t throw that plastic bottle in the trash. It’ll sit in a landfill for a hundred thousand years!” Or: “If you’re leaving the room, turn off the light!”