[ Applause ] >>John Battelle: We're going to go over here
and have a chat.
So you can take that one.
I'll take this one.
I think we were going to start with a little bit of discussion about the curiosity of space
and being out there and seeing that.
But I think given the events that have occurred in the earlier part of this week, the audience
is most likely curious about your reaction.
You were in the same situation as the families and the victims of the Navy yard shooting
in Washington.
You have been in that situation.
What was your first response when you heard this news?
>>Mark Kelly: Well, first of all, let me first welcome everybody to Gabby's home state and
now mine of Arizona.
Gabby is a third-generation Tucsonan which is two hours down the road from here.
We are very excited that this conference is here in Arizona, so welcome.
You know, I'd like to be able to say that I was shocked.
Unfortunately, I've spent so much time focusing on this issue and are well-aware of how often
that we do have mass shootings that I wasn't surprised that we had another one, to be honest.
You know, it's -- we are about nine months, maybe ten months since 20 first graders were
murdered in their classrooms in Newtown, Connecticut.
And the national response so far to that tragedy has been to do nothing.
And with any problem, as many of you in this audience know, if there is a problem, and
we don't make change and we don't look for solutions, the problem isn't just going to
go away.
So I was not -- I was not surprised.
I was just -- it is just a matter of time of when is going to be the next one.
>>John Battelle: You started an organization to try to effect change on this issue after
the incident here.
What have been your successes, and what are your frustrations?
>>Mark Kelly: So Gabby and I started an organization back in January after Newtown called Americans
for Responsible Solutions.
And it is an organization that consists of a 501(c)(4) and a super PAC.
And if you would have asked Gabby or I two years ago or told us that we'd be running
a super PAC, I would say you're crazy.
To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of that political entity.
But the reality of life today is if you want to take on a very powerful gun lobby, which
is incredibly influential because of the influence that the NRA has in Washington, you got to
kind of take them on, on their own terms.
And for the last 30 years, the National Rifle Association has spent an enormous amount of
money in Washington on House and Senate races.
So we looked at what the problem is.
And it basically boils down to this, that the gun lobby spends about $20 million a year,
which to some of you does not seem like a lot of money, but they spend $20 million a
year focusing on gun rights and supporting House and Senate candidates in their federal
elections, about $20 million.
And all of the organizations on the other side of the issue typically spend combined
$20,000.
So it's out of balance.
Completely out of balance.
So we formed an organization to try to bring some balance to this debate in Washington.
And we've been around ten months, and we've raised about $14 million.
We have a goal to raise about 35 before the 2014 elections.
And over time, we will -- our hope is to get members of Congress to vote with their conscience
on this issue and not based on the influence of any organization, including ours.
>>John Battelle: I know this is a difficult subject, but, I mean, we talked previously
and you told the story of what happened and where you were when, you know, you were in
the same situation as the folks yesterday were.
You were in Houston, as I recall.
Is that correct?
>>Mark Kelly: I was in Houston the day Gabby was injured, at home with my kids.
Gabby was in Tucson in her district.
And I got a call from the woman who's now our executive director that is sitting next
to Gabby, Pia Carusone, the executive director of our organization, was Gabby's chief of
staff.
And she called me up and she just said, I don't know how to tell you this but Gabby's
been shot.
She didn't have much more info.
I got off the phone with her.
Five minutes later I thought to myself: Did I just imagine that this happened?
I literally had to go walk up to my phone, pick it up off the table and say, Okay, I
did get that incoming call.
And then I called Pia back and that's when she gave me the really devastating news that
Gabby had been shot in the head.
And my kids and I and my mom got on a friend's airplane and we flew west towards Tucson.
During that flight, it was pretty chaotic.
We were watching TV.
And at one point, MSNBC, Fox, CNN all pronounced Gabby dead, which they shouldn't do.
Do we got any doctors in the audience?
We should leave that -- >>John Battelle: You mean journalists shouldn't
be pronouncing people dead.
>>Mark Kelly: Journalists shouldn't be doing that especially on only the one source.
That was not a good idea.
>>John Battelle: One of the great stories that came out of this is how Gabby responded.
Were you surprised and what did you learn from that process?
>>Mark Kelly: Well, Gabby's tough.
Really, really tough.
I mean, she takes on, you know, issues like nobody I've ever seen.
When she was in Congress, you know, she was a bipartisan legislator.
You know, Gabby in her second term in Congress was the person in the middle.
The National Journal, I think, ranks members from all the way on the right to all the way
on the left, and Gabby was the person in the middle in her second term.
So she's tried to always tackle issues in a bipartisan fashion.
And that -- you know, that's what we're doing on this issue.
We're trying to engage members of Congress.
We -- you know, we recently worked on this Manchin-Toomey bill which failed in the Senate.
But we made progress.
The United States Senator from Arizona, John McCain, voted for it.
That's a step in the right direction.
I think over time, we will convince more legislators and also folks at the state level that we
have to do something about this problem.
I don't think people realize this, but we have 15 to 20 times the death rate from gun
violence than any other industrialized country.
15 times is the best that we can do over the next worst industrial country.
I was talking to a gentleman that had arranged the Google meet-up with the Free Syrian Army
major, and I asked him, I said, "How many people have died there in the last couple
of years?"
He said, "110,000."
You know how many people have died in the United States from gun violence in the last
two years?
Almost that many.
Probably about 80,000.
And we're not at war.
>>John Battelle: That's extraordinary.
I want to pivot, if we can, because I think we'll come back to this subject, but ask you,
because a theme throughout the conference and throughout this session has to do with
wonder and curiosity.
You have been where very few of us have been.
You have seen the Earth through the capsule of a ship orbiting it.
What's that like?
>>Mark Kelly: Well, flying in space is an incredible privilege.
I mean, I am very thankful that I had the opportunity to do that not once, but four
times, and I -- you know, I really treasure every day I've got to spend in space.
My -- the part I like the most is the rocket launch.
[ Laughter ] >>Mark Kelly: I mean, you can't --
>>John Battelle: The G forces.
>>Mark Kelly: Well, it's not the G forces.
It's the matter that you climb into this rocket ship about three hours before liftoff, you're
laying on your back, you got all this stuff you got to turn on, the countdown clock is
heading towards zero.
Six seconds, the main engines start.
You don't go anywhere because you're literally bolted to the launchpad.
Then the clock hits zero, those bolts explode, solid rocket boosters light.
It's literally like the hand of God coming down and ripping you off the planet.
Incredible amount of vibration.
You accelerate from zero to 17,500 miles an hour in just 8 1/2 minutes.
Two minutes into the flight -- you guys have seen this -- the solids come off.
They go in the ocean.
NASA goes and picks those up, reuses them.
I think they're only slightly more expensive to reuse.
[ Laughter ] >>Mark Kelly: And then we continue to go uphill.
At the end of that 8 1/2 minutes, the tank comes off and you're whipping around the planet
every -- every 90 minutes.
And it's amazing to see this big blue marble just floating in the blackness of space, no
strings attached.
You know, just as a globe.
It's just an incredible experience.
Hope to get to do it again sometime.
>>John Battelle: I imagine everyone here would like to do it, too.
[ Laughter ] >>John Battelle: Especially after that description.
Did seeing that -- I mean, there's a famous image from the Whole Earth Catalog of the
earth that sort of sparked a movement, I think, and made us all realize that we needed to
maybe start taking more drugs.
[ Laughter ] >>John Battelle: I did not mean to ask that
question, but did it change your perspective about the world in a way that was meaningful?
I mean...
>>Mark Kelly: The thing it did for me -- and I think everybody's experience is a little
bit different -- but I noticed on my first flight, first day, you know, we're up at about
250 miles, maybe, looking down at the planet and you look at the edge, you know, the terminator
-- you know, the edge of the horizon -- and you see this little sliver there.
And I remember mentioning it to my commander on my first flight.
I said, "Hey, you see that little sliver there?"
And he says, "Yeah, that's the atmosphere."
And from that perspective, when you consider when you look at it from Earth orbit and you
see this little tiny haze and that's our atmosphere, it makes you understand that it needs to be
protected.
Half of our atmosphere is 10,000 feet and below.
That's half of it.
You know, the other half goes -- continues to go up, but by molecules, half of it is
below 10,000 feet.
Not very -- not very thick, and we need to be aware of that.
>>John Battelle: Yeah.
I imagine that does give you some perspective.
What's going on with the space program now?
I mean, it's -- I think the idea of children growing up thinking they might -- we may have
missed a generation of kids who thought that that was something they might do.
Do you think that the next generation might have that dream again?
>>Mark Kelly: I think they will.
We -- you know, part of our problem with our space program is we often start and stop programs
maybe not for the best of reasons.
In my 16 years at NASA, I've seen the administration and the White House cancel programs.
I've seen Congress and NASA itself cancel things that if we -- if we maintained the
focus and we worked really hard, we can solve these problems.
I think we can solve anything.
I think -- you know, we have the best engineers in the world.
We can solve very difficult problems.
But we often give up and we shouldn't.
And it always frustrated me when NASA decided to end a program and continue in a different
direction.
So my hope now is we're on this path currently with a program called "Commercial Crew," which
are these smaller companies, a company like SpaceX or Sierra Nevada, for instance, and
others -- Blue Origins -- that are going to try to transport crew members to the International
Space Station.
And for full disclosure, I do some consulting with SpaceX, but from my experience there,
they'll be able to figure this out and at some point they're going to be flying people
in space on SpaceX spacecraft.
It's just a matter of the United States government and NASA maintaining that focus and deciding
not to do something else.
Now, if you ask me when we're going to go to Mars with people, I have no idea.
>>John Battelle: There's a fellow coming up later who can address that.
>>Mark Kelly: I mean, we could send somebody to Mars right now.
The problem is we can't get them back.
[ Laughter ] >>Mark Kelly: So that's the hard part.
That's the trick.
>>John Battelle: Well, I mean, when you're strapped to a rocket, about to be catapulted
or I suppose lifted by the hand of God, don't you sort of figure that you might not be coming
back?
>>Mark Kelly: You recognize that there is a real probability that that's going to be
your last day, especially on liftoff and on landing.
Oddly enough, statistically, our most dangerous -- calculated most dangerous time is the time
we spend in space, from getting hit by a big rock or even a little rock that puts a big
hole in the spacecraft.
But, you know, you're aware of that.
We spend a lot of time training for these missions.
The space shuttle as -- you know, as a point of reference, is very crew-intensive, and
there's a lot we can do when things go wrong to fix the problem.
But then there's all this other stuff that we can't do anything about and can be catastrophic,
and those things we don't -- you just hope they don't happen, you don't worry about them
too much.
>>John Battelle: Well, I think this is a good transition in terms of the idea that you thought
it might be your last day.
You went through that experience with your wife, so I'd like you to introduce her, if
you could.
>>Mark Kelly: So Gabby -- like I mentioned earlier, Gabby and I have been working on
this issue of gun violence for about 10 months now, or 9 months, with our organization called
Americans for Responsible Solutions.
We've been traveling around the country.
We recently hit seven states in seven days trying to get legislators to focus on the
problem, and we have some focus and we have good people in Congress that want to do something.
But, you know, the issue is, you know, unfortunately the influence of the gun lobby, and the NRA
in particular has done a tremendous job.
You got to give them a lot of credit.
They have worked that issue to their benefit very well.
But it's going to be our job to create an effective counterbalance to that.
And I am inspired each and every day by, you know, the approach that my wife has taken,
that she's willing to get out there despite having been almost killed by gun violence
herself, her career ended, but she's motivated to do this.
You know, Gabby Giffords reminds me each and every day to deny the acceptance of failure.
You know, often when she gets in that car, if we're going off to therapy each day, one
of the last things she'll say is, "Fight, fight, fight."
She does not give up and she's really committed to this.
So I'd like to introduce you to my beautiful wife, Gabby Giffords.
[ Cheers and applause ] >>Mark Kelly: So from Gabby's injury, she
suffers from a condition called aphasia, which is a difficulty with communication, so we
were working on this statement at the breakfast table the other day.
I recently had -- well, a while back I had some surgery on my right elbow.
I ripped the bicep tendon off the bone pole vaulting.
Don't ask me why at my age I was pole vaulting, but I was.
And I was complaining to Gabby.
She was eating her yogurt.
We were working on this.
I was complaining about how my arm hurt, and she looked up from her yogurt and with just
a raise of her eyebrow said to me, "Are you freakin' kidding me?"
[ Laughter ] So Gabby Giffords.
>>Gabby Giffords: Thank you for inviting us here today.
Thank you.
Stopping gun violence takes courage, the courage to do what's right.
The courage of new ideas.
I've seen great courage when my life was on the line.
Now is the time to come together.
Be responsible.
Democrats, republicans, everyone, we must never stop fighting!
Fight, fight, fight!
Be bold.
Be courageous.
The nation is counting on you.
Thank you.
>>Mark Kelly: Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
>>Gabby Giffords: Thank you.
[ Cheers and Applause ]