A former astronaut, Mark Kelly, has won win a Senate seat in Arizona. Kelly, running on a Democratic ticket, beat his opponent, Republican Martha McSally, by 52% to 48%.
Kelly is the husband of a former Arizona Congresswoman, Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011 in an attempted assassination. She was shot by a lone gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six people in the shooting incident. Giffords survived but with serious head injuries. In 2012 Loughner was sentenced to life in prison plus a further 140 years. He was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Kelly is a former combat pilot and flew in the Gulf War. Subsequently he became an astronaut and piloted the Space Shuttle a number of times, with his last flight being in 2011. His twin brother, Scott, is also an astronaut, making the pair the only siblings to have both travelled to space.
He ran for Senate on a gun control platform, perhaps unsurprisingly given the incident with his wife. However, The Economist notes that he still supports the right to bear arms and is likely to be a bipartisan Senator. In a state which borders Mexico, he has also emphasized that he supports strict border control, setting him apart from many other Democrats.
Kelly is not the first astronaut to be elected to the Senate. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, became a Senator for Ohio in 1974, and Harrison Schmitt, one of the 12 men who have walked on the Moon, became a Senator in 1976, representing New Mexico. Jake Garn, a Utah Senator, also travelled into space, but after he had been elected to the Senate. Having been first elected in 1974, he flew with the Space Shuttle in 1985. He was the first sitting member of Congress to travel into space.
Image: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons