In an inspired choice, Esquire chooses Mark Kelly, the calm astronaut whose wife, congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was brutally shot in the face doing her job. Money quote:
In space, Kelly had received further instruction in catastrophe. On his third trip into orbit, he had delivered a part to the International Space Station, where the residents needed badly to fix their broken toilet. His previous flight had been only the second after the Columbia disaster. Astronauts understand: Something always goes wrong. On the day his wife was shot, during the torturous flight that Kelly, his mother, and his daughters from a previous marriage made from Houston to Tucson, there were twenty minutes when he thought he had lost his wife for good. He was flying on a friend's private plane, and he had turned on the TV to watch reports of the shooting. "It was a terrible mistake," he said later. In the chaos, someone said that his wife was dead. His mother practically screamed, he remembered after; his daughters cried. Kelly retreated to the bathroom. "I just, you know, walked into the bathroom and, you know, broke down," he said. Eventually, he managed to get through to someone at the hospital, and he found out then that Giffords was, in fact, alive. "As bad as it was that she had died," Kelly said, "it's equally exciting that she hadn't."
(Photo: In this handout image provided by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' office on January 11, 2011, Mark Kelly, husband of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), holds his wife's hand in the congresswoman's hospital room at University Medical Center January 9, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona. Six people were killed and at least 13 others wounded, including Giffords, when a gunman opened fire at a public event held at Tucson Safeway supermarket. By U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' office via Getty Images.)
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