Kelly rushed by private jet from Houston to Tucson with his two teenage daughters and his mother, as soon as he learned of the assassination attempt.

His shuttle co-pilot, Gregory Johnson, was also moving at rocket speed. He opened his Houston home to the rest of 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, all men, have 15 children among them, from 3 to 17 years old.

Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori's plane had just landed in Houston when he got the urgent one-word message. "Call." Just the day before, Italy's president had given him a flag to fly into space.

The news hit Vittori hard, just as it did everyone else on the crew and at NASA.

"Crews get close after 18 months," Johnson explained in an interview with The Associated Press, "and all my kids had met Gabby on numerous occasions and we had socialized together as a crew. So just getting past that emotional trauma was important. And then we were faced with OK, what do we do next? How are we going to move on?"

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.

For several weeks, Johnson and his crewmates didn't know whether Kelly would fly the April mission or whether the flight might be delayed. A backup commander stepped in to keep up the training momentum.

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.