Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [70]
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.