CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Looking back on the horror of that Saturday in January, this seems miraculous today: that Mark Kelly indeed will command the next-to-last space shuttle flight and his wounded wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, will be in Florida watching.
Yet that's what's expected to happen Friday. In an interview with CBS' Katie Couric, excerpts of which were released Sunday, Kelly said Giffords' doctors have cleared her to travel to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to watch.
"I've met with her doctors, her neurosurgeon and her doctors, and ... they've given us permission to take her down to the launch," Kelly said in the interview in Houston. It will be the first time Giffords has traveled since she was flown from Tucson to Houston on Jan. 21 for rehab.
The Kelly-Giffords ordeal has been a national drama since Jan. 8, when the congresswoman was shot in the head at a meet-and-greet on Tucson's northwest side.
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The couple's love story - her struggle to survive a serious brain injury and her remarkable progress, and his devotion to both his wife and NASA - has overshadowed Endeavour's final voyage and the looming end of the shuttle program.
It's all about Mark and Gabby.
"They're America's sweethearts," said Susan Still Kilrain, a former space shuttle pilot.
On a day fit for princes and princesses - Britain's Prince William will wed Kate Middleton that morning - Endeavour's scheduled 3:47 p.m. blastoff is the big draw for everyone on Florida's Space Coast.
The Obama family will be here, as will a congressional contingent and an estimated 40,000 other NASA guests. Plus, hundreds of thousands are expected to jam surrounding beaches and roadways, all eager to catch one of the last two space shuttle launches.
No one, it seems, can resist the real-life drama surrounding the 47-year-old astronaut and the 40-year-old congresswoman, married just three years when a bullet changed everything. The shooting rampage left six dead and 13 injured, including Giffords.
Kelly rushed by private jet from Houston with his mother and two teenage daughters as soon as he learned of the assassination attempt.
His shuttle co-pilot, Gregory Johnson, also was moving at rocket speed. He opened his Houston home to the shuttle crew and their families that bleak Saturday night, as he struggled to come up with a game plan amid the shock waves.
"We wanted to deal with the emotions of all the kids. My daughter was completely beside herself," recalled Johnson. The six astronauts have 15 children among them, from 3 to 17 years old.
Kelly figured he'd be at his wife's ICU bedside for "maybe two, four, six months." That's what her trauma surgeon and neurosurgeon warned him, in the hours after the shooting.
"I'm pretty sure I'm done," he told his boss, chief astronaut Peggy Whitson.
But as the days went by, Giffords made steady progress. Her previous good health, great care "and maybe a little bit of luck" contributed to her swift improvement, Kelly said. "Or maybe people really thinking about her and praying for her." The astronaut's aunt is a Catholic nun. As it turns out, Pope Benedict XVI will make the first papal call to space during Endeavour's mission.
After a monthlong leave, Kelly returned to work in February at Johnson Space Center, bringing his wife to Houston for rehab.
As he resumed training, his wife's full days of rehab were paying off. She began walking and talking more, completing short sentences. She also began to take stock of what had happened to her; Kelly told her she'd been shot.
Kelly settled into a routine: early mornings with Giffords, taking her a newspaper and a cup of her favorite nonfat latte with cinnamon on top, then straight to Johnson for a long day of training, then back to the rehab center to say good night to his wife.
Before the tragedy, the two split their time among Texas, Arizona and Washington, getting together as many weekends as possible. The shooting brought them together practically every day, until Friday. As is the custom one week before liftoff, Kelly and his crew went into quarantine.
Almost certainly, Giffords will be kept out of public sight at the launch, as she has been ever since the shooting occurred. Her husband will face the cameras when he arrives Tuesday with his crew at Kennedy Space Center, and again on launch day.
Dr. Anna Fisher, a NASA manager for future spacecraft, said it's natural the world is focused more on the Kelly-Giffords saga than Endeavour's grand finale, though she thinks all the previous 133 shuttle flights should have gotten more attention. "Whenever everything goes well, nobody pays attention," said Fisher, one of NASA's first female astronauts.
Indeed, journalists have descended in droves on NASA news conferences - those with or about Kelly - in a way not seen since shuttle flight resumed in 2005 after the Columbia disaster.
