Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut in space, died earlier today (June 4) after completing a career that nobody could ever have predicted 76 years ago. He was born in 1949 when rockets were best-known as military weapons for the Second World War. He matured in the heady 1960s when the first Americans climbed upon these converted ballistic missiles for spaceflights.
Then Garneau, when just 35 years old, climbed upon one of the early flights of the NASA space shuttle and stunned the country. A Canadian naval engineer flying into orbit? Not something Garneau could have charted or planned for. Beyond the clear nationality issue for early astronaut hopefuls – no American citizenship to use here – Garneau loved sharing that he was no test pilot. That didn’t stop the Canadian media of 1983 frequently citing The Right Stuff test-pilot-slash-astronaut movie of that year during his astronaut selection.
Garneau went on to do many things besides being an astronaut, of course. That said, he had a sense of humour about the realities of space fame: he still couldn’t get a quiet seat at a restaurant decades later, he once joked to me, and after years as cabinet minister he still would meet people on the street who knew him for space and only incidentally for politics.
“We wish to express our heartfelt thanks for the outpouring of support, concern, and kind words received over the past few days,” wife Pam Garneau shared in a statement with media. “We are especially grateful to the medical team who provided such dedicated and compassionate care during his short illness. We kindly ask for privacy as we grieve this profound loss and take time to reflect and heal.”
Garneau left behind four children; his first wife, Jacqueline Brown, predeceased him in 1987.
Both the Senate and the House of Commons observed moments of silence for Garneau today. Governor General Mary Simon’s statement about Garneau included a tribute to his “legacy of integrity, professionalism, and a profound contribution to our understanding of the universe.” Politicians from several parties praised Garneau’s work and character, including former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On X, retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield called Garneau “my role model, mentor, 30-plus-year close friend and a brave and exemplary Canadian for us all.” Canadian astronaut Josh Kutryk, speaking on CTV, called Garneau “a hero of mine for as long as I can remember.”
Late in the evening, the CSA issued its own statement (news of Garneau’s passing had come at the end of business hours). “His decades of unwavering service – as a naval engineer, astronaut and Parliamentarian – is an inspiration to all Canadians. He embodied the very essence of public service,” the statement read in part.
Joseph Jean-Pierre Marc Garneau was born on Feb. 23, 1949 in Quebec City, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. After primary and secondary education in the province, Garneau’s post-secondary studies first took him to Collège Militaire Royale in Saint-Jean, Que. and the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont.
After earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics at RMC in 1970, Garneau moved to London (U.K.) to study for – and eventually earn – his doctorate in electrical engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Then he went to Canadian Forces Command and Staff College in Toronto in 1982-83, graduating at age 34. Garneau also served in the Canadian Forces as a naval officer, including designing a simulator for training officers for missile systems in Tribal-class destroyers, the encyclopedia notes.
In 1982, Garneau moved to Ottawa as a newly promoted commander to specialize in electronic warfare equipment and systems. It was not long after that that Garneau read in the newspaper that Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) was seeking the first six astronauts for our country’s program.
How that was arranged is a book-length story in itself, but very simply put, Canada’s government had pledged to contribute a robotic arm, Canadarm, to the space shuttle. It exceeded expectations for maintenance and spacewalk duties, starting from its first flight on STS-2 in 1981. The arm included contributions from NRC and Spar Aerospace (now MDA Space), among other heritage. Canadarm is retired, but Canadarm2 is active on the ISS and Canadarm3 for lunar exploration is in development.
Canada, and other international partners, were also in discussions with NASA for a future space station in which there would be flight opportunities. That station project eventually coalesced into the ISS. (There were also policy implications and funding difficulties amid the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Congressional budgets, which are too complex to go into deeply in a short article.)
NASA extended an invitation to Canada that eventually resulted in Canada recruiting six astronauts in December 1983, including Garneau – who was seconded from the Department of National Defence. The Canadians were based at NRC and did most of their training and research there, in Ottawa. The first flight opportunity arose quite rapidly, with Garneau asked a few months later to work as payload specialist for STS-41G aboard Challenger. He joined with backup Robert Thirsk late in the training flow, which was standard NASA procedure at the time as payload specialists were technically responsible for small numbers of experiments.
What NASA later learned, from Garneau’s and others’ experience, was it was more difficult to form cohesive crews when some of the astronauts were brought on quite late. Garneau later – and often – spoke of how he felt isolated during the American phases of his training. To be fair, some U.S. astronauts were upset that they were still waiting on flight opportunities – one for close on 20 years, Garneau said. NASA changed its training policy decades ago and it is now second nature for ISS crews to train as a unit.
Garneau’s actual spaceflight was a standard length for the age, lasting from Oct. 5 to 13, 1984. Five Canadian researchers flew experiments on the mission, including the space vision system that would be used to assist Canadarm in assessing distance to targets in space.
Naturally, the Canadian media played close attention, reporting on what they could even though Garneau’s access to communications was limited given the nature of shuttle missions, and his junior status on the crew. Garneau was sometimes noted as reticent even with these challenges, but in the decades since he noted the pressure of performance: “If I had screwed up badly on my first flight, it would have caused NASA to hesitate (and say), ‘Well, those Canadians,’ even though it’d be a sample of one,” he told The Toronto Star in 2024.
Garneau returned to a flurry of media attention, and given his status as first Canadian it never really went away. His new focus at work was assisting with the upcoming flight of Steve MacLean, which ultimately delayed to 1992 after the 1986 explosion of Challenger altered the flight schedule.
Garneau retired from the Navy in 1989. He served as deputy director of the Canadian astronaut program from 1989 to 1992, including the first few years of the beginning of the Canadian Space Agency – which took over the NRC’s astronaut program and moved the corps to Longueuil, Que. After Canada selected its second group of astronauts in 1992, that July Garneau and the newly hired Chris Hadfield did mission specialist training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. That designation allowed astronauts to operate Canadarm, perform spacewalks and work on all systems of the shuttle. Today, active Canadian astronauts are based out of JSC, but return regularly to Longueuil for training, public relations, public policy and similar duties.
Garneau flew twice as a mission specialist and operated the Canadarm on both occasions, during STS-77 on Endeavour in 1996 and STS-97 on Endeavour (again) in 2000. He logged 677 hours in space and his ground duties, notably, included being the first non-American to communicate with a space shuttle crew in mission control as capcom, the encyclopedia stated. The Canadian science performed on these missions was extensive, and besides which, STS-97 was an early ISS assembly flight that brought solar panels and batteries to the orbiting complex. Garneau often called steering Canadarm one of his proudest accomplishments in space.
Garneau next stepped into upper management at the CSA, serving as executive vice-president in February 2001 and then being appointed to president in November that same year. Garneau’s tenure as president included a lull in Canadian space funding by the governments of the day, and unfortunately overlapped with the loss of the Columbia and its crew in 2003.
His visions for sending a Canadian robotic mission to Mars did not come to fruition in that environment. That said, a notable success was seeing the mobile servicing system deployed on the ISS – along with ground infrastructure, including training facilities and a control centre at the CSA, according to the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame.
“Without this unique and indispensable Canadian system … the highly complex ISS simply could not have been built,” Garneau’s entry in the hall of fame states. “His stewardship of this dimension of the ISS program was a major element of Canada’s role in an exclusive group of nations.”
Garneau resigned as CSA president in November 2005 to run for a seat on behalf of the Liberal Party. His 2006 bid in Vaudreuil–Soulanges, Que. was unsuccessful as the incumbent (Meili Faille, the Bloc Québécois) held onto the seat. Garneau did get a seat in Parliament in the 2008 election, representing Westmount–Ville-Marie in Montreal. Garneau narrowly hung onto that seat in the 2011, when the Liberals sunk to an all-time low of 34 seats in the House of Commons.
Garneau’s influence rose in the smaller Liberal party. He became House leader and made a run for the leadership in 2012, ultimately stepping aside a month before the 2013 convention that saw Justin Trudeau selected. After winning the 2015 election on behalf of Notre-Dame-de-Grace – Westmount, Garneau became Minister of Transport. He helmed that portfolio from November 2015 to January 2021, then took on the higher-profile Minister of Foreign Affairs portfolio between January and October 2021. He retired from politics on March 8, 2023.
Garneau the person
As an appendix to Garneau’s obituary, my long-time editor (Marc Boucher) and I agreed I should talk a bit about the character of Garneau. I was fortunate to talk with Garneau many times in the last two decades. When I was a student at Carleton University in Ottawa studying journalism, Garneau was chancellor there between 2003 and 2008 – including his term as CSA president. (Side benefits of completing the program included having a literal astronaut mingling at the graduation party, and getting a diploma with that astronaut’s signature on it.)
More seriously: Garneau made several visits a year to Carleton, and as far as I could tell as a cub reporter it was mostly to spend time with students. He not only prioritized graduation ceremonies, but made sure to do talks with engineering classes and other students close to space exploration. Additionally, he willingly sat for several interviews with me – including my first-ever feature article concerning the 20th anniversary of STS-41G. For a medium-sized student newspaper, I might add. Quite a generous act of a CSA president to sit so long and often, with a student only having a few dozen articles to her name.
We touched base frequently over the decades, most memorably for my 2020 book Canadarm and Collaboration about the Canadian space program. Frankly, Garneau – then Minister of Transport – was integral to the book as Canada’s first astronaut, first astronaut-CSA president and first astronaut-politician; I could not imagine having done it without interviewing him. But, we ran into the unexpected a couple of times.
Our (long scheduled) in-person book interview just happened to fall two days after Garneau’s office restricted all Canadian airspace to Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 aircraft during one of the defining aviation crises of the last decade. I thought my trip to Montreal would be in vain; his office bravely went ahead with a small schedule change. Not only that – his representatives made time to help me with fact-checking that unfortunately had to go ahead in March 2020; no matter the state of the world, the printer needed the manuscript. Somewhere between managing global shutdowns, quarantine logistics and the overused “unprecedented times” as a cabinet minister, Garneau kept his promise and I got the fact-checking feedback I needed.
Last fall, I was on assignment at the Ingenium Centre – a museum storage facility in Ottawa. The staff surprised me: Garneau had donated some space artifacts, and they were still accessible as the archivists hadn’t processed them yet. Standing by one of Garneau’s STS-97 flight suits, lying casually in a box upon wrapping, really brings one out of the everyday-mundane quickly. Luckily I had an interview booked with Garneau to talk about the donations as he promoted his own book: A Most Extraordinary Ride. In true astronaut style, he took the call in between promotional events in some car backseat.
It what turned out to be our last interview, we talked about his career and he shared what space and its opportunities meant to him, 40 years after his first spaceflight: “You become more conscious of the bigger issues and you begin to focus on those bigger issues once you’ve seen Earth from space. I think that only became stronger with my two other flights.”
Ad astra.