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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The traveler husband of injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has prefabricated his choice. He's headlike to expanse in April.

An authorised close to the expanse shuttle information addicted weekday morning that traveler Mark buffoon module be aboard Endeavour for its final flight. The authorised did not poverty to be titled because the information has not yet been prefabricated public.

Kelly is holding a programme conference at President Space Center in metropolis on weekday afternoon.

He took a yield from upbringing after his wife was gunned downbound outside a Tucson, Ariz., supermarket on Jan. 8 as she met with constituents on Jan. 8. Six people were killed and 12 others injured. Giffords is today undergoing rehab in Houston.

Kelly, 46, spent the past period debating whether to step downbound as man of Endeavour's two-week mission. As he painful over the decision, NASA titled a backup commander, Rick Sturckow, who connected gathering training.

Liftoff is targeted for Apr 19.

Kelly's identical twin, Scott, currently man of the International Space Station, hinted in an discourse early this week that his brother would opt to fly.

Kelly has flown three nowadays aboard expanse shuttles; April's activate to the International Space Station module be his fourth.

The assignment already was set to be one of the highest strikingness shuttle flights ever. It module be Endeavour's last voyage and the next-to-last for the full 30-year shuttle program, and module feature the conveying of an enlarge physics experiment by a Nobel accolade winner.

With buffoon backwards on board, the launch module "get the aforementioned category of tending that the (1998) John Glenn mission" received, said histrion McCurdy, a open policy professor and expanse expert at American University in Washington, D.C.

McCurdy advisable the open module acceptation Kelly's decision, because it provides a sense of normalcy.

"We every poverty her to go backwards to Congress; we'd aforementioned them both to move their careers and we'd aforementioned them to be full and connatural as if this abstract had never happened," said McCurdy, communicator of the aggregation "Space and the American Imagination."

Both Kellys are Navy captains and connected NASA's traveler corps in 1996. In an discourse from the expanse send Wednesday, histrion buffoon said their Navy background as high-performance pilots enables them to put their individualized lives aside, when necessary, and pore on the employ at hand.

"My brother certainly is rattling beatific at that," he told The Associated Press. "If he does choose, and NASA management chooses, for him to control this assignment ... I am dead 100 proportionality confident that he module hit no problem fulfilling his responsibilities the aforementioned way as if this incident would hit never occurred."

Scott buffoon module be backwards on Earth by the time his brother flies. He's cod to land in a Slavonic Soyuz capsulise in mid-March, closing discover a 5 1/2-month mission.

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AP Science Writer man Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

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