A DIFFERENT SPACE
Nearly 8 years after the tragic day that changed everything, Mark Kelly is on a new mission and pondering the next one
TUCSON — Maybe he’ll fly again, so Mark Kelly tries to stay in near-astronaut shape. He turns down TV requests if they interfere with his workouts and searches his schedule for afternoons to play golf. A couple of years ago, he learned how to skydive. And he always finds time for a hike or a workout at Gym 244, a bare-bones facility that reminds him of the one NASA used to have, before they ripped it out and replaced it with something new.
Kelly covets routine, and Gym 244 feels familiar. His face is on a Wheaties box by the front door. There’s no central air-conditioning, so the brick walls trap heat and sweat. He likes that. It scares off lesser men.
The Tucson temperature topped 108 degrees when Kelly arrived at the gym on a recent Monday afternoon. It was hotter inside. He walked through an open door and found his trainer of three years, Chris Gartrell, doing planks with 45-pound weights on his back. “I’m not doing that,” Kelly said. “By the end,” Gartrell said, popping to his feet, “you might be.”
Kelly could only shake his head. He’s 54 years old now, though it’s hard to tell. Seven confounding years barely show themselves, and other than a balky left knee, he claims to feel no different than when he was a young Navy pilot. But he’s deep into middle age, living squarely in the stage when successful men feel the pull to rearrange their
lives, to throw it all away and start over.
He’s already done that. It wasn’t his choice. Life reset itself in January 2011, when a man shot and almost killed Kelly’s wife, then-U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, outside a Safeway near Tucson. Kelly held on to what he could and rebuilt the rest.
Now, as life has settled into a slow burn, he’s not sure he wants to do it again.
“I’m very satisfied with where we are,” he said in an interview. But satisfaction isn’t the same thing as happiness, so he clarified. “I’m a pretty happy person,” he said. “I’m always of the attitude that if I don’t like my life, I can change it. It’s perfectly in my power to make a big change if I wanted.”
If I wanted. Everything hangs on three words. People around him seem to sense that a big change could be coming soon. He certainly has the options. But for the first time in a long time — maybe the first time in his entire adult life — Mark Kelly doesn’t know what he wants.
He knows the choices. He could go even deeper with Giffords, the political organization he and Gabby built in an attempt to end gun violence. He still plans to fly World View Enterprises’ private passenger spacecraft, Voyager, if the company ever finishes the project. He could bolster a lucrative speaking schedule, or write more memoirs and children’s books, or pick up the political career his wife never finished.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s interesting that I don’t, because I often talk about having a goal and a plan. I advocate for people planning stuff out. But I’m still working on that for me.”
In the meantime, Kelly has found checkpoints wherever they come. Life at NASA ran on step-by-step commands, but successes are more subtle now: Gabby’s speech gets a half-second smoother, a piece of legislation gains a few points in a poll, a senator starts to change his mind. Kelly wants to drop his golf score back into the 70s. He can still bench-press 250 pounds if he pushes himself, and he half-seriously asked his trainer if he has a shot at breaking the Arizona record.
“If I could get to 300, for my age group, what would that be?” Kelly asked midway through his workout. He spoke with the tone of a man who knew he was being unrealistic and didn’t care.
“That would be it,” Gartrell said.
Kelly considered it. “So,” he said slowly. “For my age group, I could hold the Arizona record.”
Then he smirked. He might have been serious. He does love a challenge.
“I’m always of the attitude that if I don’t like my life, I can change it.” Mark Kelly
Former astronaut and husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords
A home in Tucson, for good
He swears he’s never moving again.
After too many homes in too many places, Kelly has spent the past six years in Tucson, in a wide Southwestern-style ranch near the center of the city. It’s within biking distance of their favorite movie theater and Bentley’s, the veggie-heavy breakfast spot where he and Gabby start almost every day. Her childhood home is just a few miles away.
She chose the house on sight. They moved in a year after the shooting and filled the walls with reminders of the lives they once led. The plaque from Gabby’s congressional office leans on a shelf by the front door. Tiny trophies bearing their names claim every inch of the living room windowsills, right by the graffiti-covered door from Kelly’s quarters on the USS Midway.
“They’ll have to carry me out of here in a box,” Kelly said. Soon it’ll be the place he’s lived longest in his life.
For now, that’s his childhood home in West Orange, New Jersey. In Garden State slang, he and his twin brother, Scott, grew up at “Exit 145 on the Parkway and 15W on the Turnpike,” where both of their parents were police officers.
It was Mark who first realized school might be worth the effort. He started paying attention, working his way into the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy before deciding he just wanted to fly. In the Navy, he flew 39 combat missions over the Persian Gulf before borrowing his brother’s suit and interviewing for a spot at NASA. Scott applied, too, and wore the same suit. Both made the cut.
Mark met Gabby in 2003, back when she still went by Gabrielle. They married in 2007 and lived a longdistance marriage. She worked in D.C., a first-term congresswoman, and lived in Arizona; he stayed in Houston’s NASA bubble, training his team for the space shuttle Endeavour’s final flight, scheduled for the spring of 2011. It would be his fourth time in space.
He hadn’t seriously considered what came after he landed. With his resume, he probably could’ve commanded the International Space Station or tried to pilot the first private flight to space. Or maybe he’d return to the Navy and work his way up the Pentagon. That way, he and Gabby could live together.
But before he could decide, a man in a hoodie shattered that future.
Now he’s a full-blown Arizonan. He hikes in 108-degree days. He eats prickly pear fruit straight off the cactus — though he thinks the margaritas are pretty good, too — and holds opinions on certain trails at the Grand Canyon. When the time comes, he knows a guy who can get him a spot near Havasu Falls. Though he has Pitbull’s number in his phone — Kelly calls him Armando — he still still plays music from local band Calexico at home.
But he swears the years haven’t changed him. Maybe he’s a little more patient, and he’s definitely more protective, but Kelly claims to be the same man he was before. He stays level. Friends and family marvel at how nothing seems to rattle him anymore. The tiny frustrations faded away.
“What I notice is that things don’t seem to bother him as much as they used to,” Scott said.
When you’ve already lived the worst days of your life, everything else seems small.
A turning point, then another
It didn’t have to be them. Kelly knew that. They could’ve done anything. In the years after the shooting, they became known as “The Congresswoman and the Astronaut,” held among the nation’s most admired couples. They were still settling into Tucson, seeing how much of their lives they could salvage.
Kelly went to space one final time, and when he returned, he discovered that he had become the face of an epidemic. TV bookers called after each new massacre, and he sat in uncomfortable chairs and said what he thought he was supposed to: Now isn’t the time to talk about politics. The community needs to heal. There will be a time and a place. “And then, one day,” Kelly said, “I got tired of saying that.”
That day was Dec. 14, 2012. Kelly was in China, traveling to speak. Gabby was at home in Tucson. Both of them stared at CNN. In Newtown, Connecticut, a small town just 90 miles from where Kelly grew up, 20 schoolchildren were dead.
“We must help,” Gabby said over the phone. Kelly asked what she meant.
“Do something,” she said. “Not just talk.” Kelly had never talked publicly about politics before. But he couldn’t envision himself 10 years older, looking back at another decade of mass murder and everyday gun violence, wondering how much death he could’ve prevented.
“We decided to go all-in,” he said, “and figure out if we could do this.”
They named the new organization Americans for Responsible Solutions. Kelly helped hone the platform, which included expanding background checks on all gun purchases, closing what’s often called the “gun-show loophole” and keeping guns away from people with histories of violence or mental illness.
They’re moderate proposals. Kelly considers himself a moderate man. Almost by instinct, he reminds people that he does, in fact, respect the Second Amendment. He owns at least seven guns — “a hunting rifle and a bunch of handguns” — and doesn’t see a contradiction. He hasn’t screamed at Congress or used his sway to fill the streets with protests. He’s not even the face of his own organization: Gabby appears in the TV ads. But Kelly is the steady, unrelenting voice.
“He doesn’t fly planes every day anymore, but the attitude hasn’t changed,” said Pia Carusone, Gabby’s former congressional chief of staff who is now an outside consultant for the organization. “He’s very mission-driven and team-oriented. You kind of don’t get a better team member than an astronaut.”
Kelly eventually compares everything to his time with NASA. As commander, he managed a small team of astronauts and worked within a sprawling bureaucracy. Every day pointed toward the same goal. There were checkpoints and to-do lists. The mission offered a clear dividing line between success and failure.
Kelly’s political progress has been more difficult to define.
Now named Giffords, the organization has become one of the nation’s most influential voices against gun violence and the National Rifle Association. In the 2018 election cycle, the Giffords PAC has raised more than $15 million and endorsed more than 300 candidates. It responds to every mass shooting and almost every gun-related bill, and has helped push gun safety toward the top of a national issue list.
“There are clearly people walking around today, including kids, that would’ve been shot and killed if we weren’t out there doing this,” Kelly said. “I am 100 percent convinced of that.”
Giffords’ state-level power has faltered on the Hill. “Everything in Congress has been frustrating,” Carusone said. Giffords is most effective when stopping “bad stuff,” as Kelly calls bills that expand gun rights, because the organization doesn’t have enough money or power to loosen the NRA’s grip on lawmakers.
Now, just days from the midterm elections, Kelly senses an opening. The NRA warned members this year that it was in “deep financial trouble.” Democrats across the country have placed gun safety near the top of their campaign platforms.
So Kelly keeps traveling. Last year, he flew over 400,000 miles. This year, he’s already hit at least 15 states. There will be more. The woman who makes his calendar planned for him to be on the road 75 percent of the rest of the year, giving speeches and stumping for candidates he’d never met. Kelly told her to make it 70 percent.
He wanted more time at home. If only a couple of extra days.
‘Really? That’s all of you’
The remains of an August thunderstorm hung in the air as Mark and Gabby flew into Albuquerque. At the airport, they piled into a black Suburban and headed straight for the University of New Mexico’s downtown campus, where nine young activists had gathered to share stories of gun violence and talk about a way to stop it.
The Suburban rolled to a stop by a back entrance. “Ready, Gabby?” Kelly asked, and they headed inside.
The mayor’s wife, Kistin Keller, introduced the guests, starting with the same painful story that had come to define their lives. “Remember that on January 8, 2011 …” she said.
When she had finished, Kelly pointed around the room and tried to memorize every student’s name. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “How many people in here know somebody who’s been shot? That doesn’t count Gabby.”
Every hand rose.
Kelly scanned the room. He glanced at Gabby, then back at the students, making sure he had seen correctly. Nine hands hung in the air.
“Really?” he said. His voice fell, as if he couldn’t believe it.“That’s all of you.”
He’d asked the same question around the world, to groups of students in Australia and the United Kingdom. Almost nobody there ever raises their hand. In the United States, he usually sees about half the group. It had never been every student in the room. The meeting ended a few minutes later. “Let us know what you need,” Kelly told a group of boys. Then the room emptied. Gabby grabbed her husband’s arm, and they walked toward the elevator.
Kelly stopped short, lost in thought. He looked back at the empty room.
“Hey, how about it,” he said, “that every one of those kids —”
Gabby cut him off.
“Guns,” she said, shaking her head. “Awful.” This was supposed to be her future. Gabby was the one with superstar potential, the rare politician who could straddle the line between partisanship and practicality. Friends looked at her and saw a future governor.
Kelly just wanted to fly.
“It was never something I had previously aspired to,” he said of a political career. “But I do get asked a lot.”
Calls for a Kelly campaign have grown constant. The
Washington Post called him “Arizona Democrats’ dream candidate.” More than 3,000 people signed an online petition urging him to run in 2018. It didn’t work. Pundits argue that his military service might endear him to the state’s deep-red desert voters. The gun-safety crusade could lure in liberals. His brother thinks he could win. Democratic Party leaders think he could win. Friends think he could win.
Kelly seems tired of the question. How many times can he give the same answer? When asked, he responds deliberately, slowly, careful not to tease at something that isn’t there.
“It’s not something I have planned,” he said. “But it’s not something I have totally eliminated as a possibility in my future. Under the right circumstances, at the right time, I might seriously consider something. That’s not today.”
He’s not sure what the right circumstances may be.
Where to next?
On their second day in Albuquerque, the group headed into the campaign offices of U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democratic candidate for governor who had earned the Giffords endorsement.
In the corner, a young woman stared at her feet. Her name was Miranda Lovato. She was a young college graduate, an Albuquerque native who still fought panic attacks after a country-music festival in Las Vegas erupted into the largest mass shooting in modern American history. Lujan Grisham asked her to speak at the rally, furthering the Giffords’ gun-safety theme. Lovato kept to herself until she looked up and saw Gabby walk into the room. Gabby reached for a hug. They both tried not to cry.
“Have you done this a lot?” Kelly asked.
“No,” she said. “First time.”
“Here’s some advice,” Kelly began, even though she hadn’t asked. “When you walk out there, tell yourself, ‘These people need to hear exactly what I have to say. It’s important.’ ”
“OK,” Lovato said. She scanned her speech one last time. She took a single breath and walked quickly toward the stage.
Kelly opened a warm bottle of water and drained it. His notes reminded him of the talking points: “America needs leadership,” one bullet point read. “We need
you to vote in November,” urged another. Gabby dropped into a cushioned chair and mouthed each word of her speech.
“Ready?” Kelly said after she finished. Gabby nodded.
He turned toward the stage and walked into a wall of cheers. Somebody handed him a microphone. “Hello, everybody,” he began.
The speech crinkled in Kelly’s back pocket. He didn’t need it. From memory, he told the room about the round table and the students who all raised their hands, then recited the same gun-violence statistics that could never capture the pain he knew firsthand.
Gabby emerged from the hallway and reached out a hand. Kelly pulled her onto the stage and flipped through his notes as she started into the same speech she gave the day before. Exactly one minute later, Gabby handed back the microphone, and cheers swept them off the stage.
Soon it was time to leave. Gabby was already waiting in the car, ready to head to their next event, in Santa Fe. They were about to be late. Kelly waved goodbye and walked into a bright New Mexico morning. Then he stopped. He turned to an assistant and asked a single question: “Where am I going next?”