MONTREAL — There’s been a lot of attention lately on one of the world’s bigmouths and his vision for space flight. It might be more profitable to listen to the thinking of one of the quiet men who knew, from hard-won experience, about travel in space, the meaning of such voyages and the lessons we on Earth might learn from them.
The sad thing is that we can no longer hear those accounts and those lessons firsthand, for Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut, died Wednesday at 76. You might think of him as Canada’s ambassador to the heavens.
“Whenever I wasn’t busy,” Garneau said of his first flight, in 1984, “I pressed my nose against the window.”
His American colleagues specialized in anodyne descriptions of what they saw out the window; the best that John H. Glenn Jr., could provide as the first American in orbit, in 1962, was “What a view!” Years later, as a senator coached by some of the finest handlers in American politics, he could muster nothing more eloquent.
On the space shuttle Challenger, however, Garneau saw a blue orb where distinctions of race, gender and ideology melted away.
That’s why, when he concluded 14 years in office — as a Liberal Party member of Parliament from his Notre-Dame-de-Grace/Westmount district, and as a cabinet minister — he gave his conservative House of Commons rivals a message that American lawmakers might adapt, should they dare — which they almost certainly won’t:
“To those sitting across from me, I want to say that I enjoy the thrust and parry in this chamber. I have always viewed those members not as enemies but as adversaries, and there is a difference. I know that every single one of them comes here wanting to make Canada a better place. We might have different views about how to do it, and that is fine, but when all is said and done, there is much more that unites us than divides us.”
His death, from multiple forms of cancer, rocked his many friends and his even larger group of admirers on both sides of the border. Sentiments that cross that frontier are rare these days — the velocity of the cross-border venom has been traveling at about 17,000 miles per hour, the speed Garneau’s space shuttle required to reach Earth orbit — so hearkening them has special power.
Garneau, who was a combat systems engineer on the HMCS Algonquin, then the newest destroyer in the Canadian Navy, once sailed across the Atlantic (and back) in a sailboat called the Pickle. Otherwise, the onetime mischievous naval midshipman didn’t sail through life. His first wife died in 1987 after struggling with mental illness. He sought the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013 and was considered the contender with the best chance of overtaking Justin Trudeau, but he withdrew from the race. “You can’t beat charisma,” he said.
Later, in 2021, Trudeau, then the prime minister, chose Garneau as transport minister and later as Canada’s chief diplomat — an unusual career destination for a man with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Trudeau dumped him nine months later, almost certainly because Garneau refused to be a sycophant. Having served for 17 space shuttle missions as the capcom for Mission Control, NASA’s interlocutor with the orbiting astronaut crew, Garneau knew the importance of speaking truth — to space administrators and to power.
Last year, as a panelist on a Toledo Blade panel on leadership, he cited both Mission Control and astronaut crews for their courage in admitting error — an ability he said was an essential element of leadership.
“What would astonish me, and really surprised me, was the honesty with which people stood up and said, ‘That is my fault,’ or ‘I did the wrong [thing],’ ‘I responded incorrectly,’ or ‘I gave the wrong advice to the crew,'” he said of NASA debriefings after exercises and space flights. “Those kinds of moments of honesty, which are, of course, crucial to me, are displaying leadership that you don’t see very much in everyday life.”
Though his obituaries inevitably emphasized his achievements beyond the surly bonds of Earth — the phrase comes not from Ronald Reagan’s speech after the 1986 Challenger disaster but from “High Flight,” the 1941 poem by John Gillespie Magee Jr., himself a Canadian fighter pilot — Garneau’s friends remember the wisdom he shared during a stroll in Westmount Park, or as he walked to his Rue Sainte-Catherine office, or the modest Le Mouton Noir bistro, where you can get a damn good marinated salmon sandwich for U.S. $5.72, and probably should.
At this point in this column, I suppose I should admit what has been obvious for the past 750 words, that Garneau was a friend of mine. That may be a journalistic sin — I quoted him a zillion times — but I’m not a solitary sinner, and offer no apologies. When the CBC broadcaster announced his death, she concluded her report saying, “He was my friend.” Chris Hadfield, who wrote two sparkling space thriller novels after flying into space three times (once as the International Space Station commander), saluted him as “my role model, mentor, 30-plus-year close friend and a brave and exemplary Canadian for us all.”
A few years ago, Garneau and I had a conversation about the inspiration space flight stirred in the generation that responded to the Kennedy goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s. The romance of that combination of engineering and purpose, like so much else, spilled across the border.
“The Apollo lunar missions drove innovation in ways never imagined, but they brought us more,” he said.
“They left us proud, even awed by what we accomplished. They gave us confidence. They made us realize we could achieve the extraordinarily difficult. They brought us together and inspired humanity. They moved us forward. We need to build on that.”
Garneau was part of the construction crew for that achievement.
He saw the Earth as a heavenly body. For Garneau, what mattered was the journey as much as the destination. His predecessor Canadian airman Magee spoke for them both:
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew — And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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