AirSpaceMag.com

The Commander
Families don’t get much space-ier than Mark Kelly’s. His wife, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, chairs a key NASA oversight subcommittee in Congress. His twin brother, Scott, is also an astronaut, and by sheer accident of timing, will be on board the International Space Station when Mark docks Endeavour there in February (on Twitter, Mark posts as ShuttleCDRKelly, Scott as StationCDRKelly). In preparation for the flight, Mark Kelly took his STS-134 crewmates to Baja, Mexico, in November for a week of camping and team-building. If theirs is indeed the last mission (NASA may add another in 2011), the 46-year-old ex-Navy pilot says his crew plans to mark the end of the shuttle era in their own way. “But,” he says, “I can’t tell you what it is.”

Robert Seale

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Photos from: "Shuttlenauts" »