The career of Marc Garneau is summarized by Tom Spears for The Line:
Astronaut Marc Garneau, with a camera in hand, floats in the hatchway that leads from Unity to Pressurized Mating Adapter-3 (PMA-3), which leads to Endeavour. Garneau, STS-97 mission specialist representing the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and his four crew mates went into the International Space Station (ISS) following hatch opening. The photograph was taken with a digital still camera, 8 December 2000.
NASA photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Marc Garneau died Wednesday, at the age of 76. His passing was announced by his wife, Pam, who said that he’d been surrounded by family at the end, and had received excellent care during an unspecified short illness. (Other reports have cited cancer as the ailment.) The news was met with an immediate outpouring of grief from Canadians from across the political spectrum, as befitted a man of his profile and stature.
He had earned that profile gradually over the decades. Back in 1983 Garneau was a young naval officer with a fine pedigree — graduate of Royal Military College, PhD in electrical engineering from Imperial College London — but unknown to most Canadians. Then he joined our country’s first group of astronauts, becoming an instant celebrity.
Even more sudden was his first assignment. He was named to a space shuttle crew that would fly the following year — lightning-fast career advancement, considering he had not yet undergone the usual training as a mission specialist in NASA’s astronaut school.
That vaulted him ahead of many more senior astronauts, and he felt it keenly. He told the Ottawa Citizen years later that he felt his colleagues’ eyes “boring holes in my back” as he walked by them. Crewmate Dave Leestma later recalled how the rookie gained the respect of those around him through quiet competence.
Indeed, Garneau always looked calm, but his mother, Jean, said as he prepared for a second flight in 1996: “There’s a lot of controlled excitement there, and happiness … He figures he’s very, very lucky.”
[…]
“Everybody was always brutally honest about how they screwed up … about how we let the team down,” Garneau says. “If we’re not going to be very honest with each other, if we’re going to find excuses … Nobody tries to evade responsibility.”
Given his background and experience, I wonder how he was able to handle being a member of the Liberal government of the day, where evading responsibility was perhaps their top competency.
