Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [128]
I thought that sounded kind of cool, and told him that if NASA approved, I was game. NASA would likely let me get the video done during some of my free time on the mission.
Bono then told me that after Gabby was shot and he saw her picture on TV, he had a feeling he had met her before. He had someone look at the photos he had taken once with members of Congress. He located the picture. Gabby has that same photo framed and on her desk.
I told Bono about Gabby’s crush on him, and that I was sure she’d get a kick out of our plan, too.
On our first morning in space on this mission, Claudia and Claire selected “Beautiful Day” for our wake-up music because they knew Gabby would appreciate it. Later in the mission, with NASA’s approval, I taped the short video clips for about thirty cities on the U2 tour. “Hello, Chicago, from the International Space Station . . .” “Hello, Montreal . . .” “Hello, Seattle . . .” “Hello, Moncton . . .” How the hell do you pronounce “Moncton”? And where is Moncton, anyway? (The answer is New Brunswick, Canada, but at the time I had no idea.)
I floated the words in front of me but they kept drifting too far away. It took more than a few takes to get it right.
It all looked pretty terrific in concert. Each night from the stage, Bono would say, “This next song is dedicated to a woman who serves her country and nearly lost her life in that service.” Then Bono looked up at the giant screen. “Imagine a man looking down on us from two hundred miles up, looking down on our beautiful crowded planet, where borders disappear and cities connect into a beautiful web of lights, where the conflicts of the world are silent. What would he say to us? What words would be in his mind?”
As he spoke, I was shown floating the words: “Seven Billion. One nation. Imagination. It’s a Beautiful Day.”
“What’s on your mind, Commander Kelly?” Bono asked.
“I’m looking forward to coming home,” I said, floating closer to the camera, and then away. “Tell my wife I love her very much. She knows.” (That’s a line from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”)
As the crowd cheered each night and I flickered off the screen, U2 would begin the opening notes of “Beautiful Day.”
In an e-mail thanking me, Bono explained how the video is received in concert. “It’s quite a special moment,” he wrote, “as it slowly dawns on people what you’re doing with the weightless word puzzle. What’s interesting to me is the level of love and support in the crowd for Gabby. The crowd roars.”
Gabby was invited to see the moment live in concert, but given her rehab schedule and her difficulty traveling, it never happened. Like thousands of other people, Gabby watched the video—“NASA Commander Mark Kelly appears at U2 360”—on YouTube. Bono is quite charming in it, but she vowed to stay with me.
On May 30, the day the stitches were removed from Gabby’s head, we undocked from the International Space Station. On June 1, it was time to come home. The landing was set for the early morning hours on the runway at Cape Canaveral, and I knew it would be tough for Gabby to return to see it. I told her I’d get to Houston as fast as I could.
Our flight directors said the mission had so far gone “absolutely flawlessly,” but I wanted to finish with a flawless landing, too. It was my job to bring Endeavour safely to the runway, and I didn’t want anyone saying I was distracted by the issues swirling in my personal life.
Shuttle commanders worked very hard to make sure that our landings were as close to perfect as possible. We practice this thousands of times in the shuttle training aircraft—a modified Gulfstream—and in the shuttle simulator. After sixteen days in space, however, it was not an easy thing to do. We’d be dehydrated during reentry because when fluids shift in zero G, astronauts end up passing a significant amount of urine. At the same time, our neurovestibular systems were not quite right. It was not uncommon to be dizzy and tired. Then there was the added pressure of knowing that every detail of the approach and landing