Marc Garneau’s tips on waiting for the shuttle to take off

A Canadian legend passed away this week when former Canadian astronaut and cabinet minister Marc Garneau died at the age of 76, after a battle with not just one type of cancer but two (lymphoma and leukemia), both of which he was diagnosed with earlier this year. He was a former combat engineer in the Canadian Navy and became the first Canadian to go into space in 1984 on the space shuttle Challenger, and after that became the president of the Canadian Space Agency and a mentor to all the Canadian astronauts that followed, including everyone’s favourite singing astronaut, Chris Hadfield. After that he was elected as a member of Parliament and served in a variety of roles for 14 years, including as Transport Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In a previous lifetime, when I was a reporter with the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, I got to spend some time with both Marc Garneau and Chris Hadfield at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2005, for what was referred to as the “Return To Flight” mission — the launch of STS-114, the first shuttle to be sent up after a hiatus of more than two years, following the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, which exploded on re-entry in 2003. As part of the 2005 mission, Macdonald Dettweiler — creator of the original Canadarm, or what was officially known as the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System — spent a lot of time and money expanding the arm’s capabilities, adding a sophisticated camera so that it could scan almost the entire exterior of the shuttle, to see if there were any gaps in the tiles or other anomalies that might cause it to explode.

I attended a number of briefings at MDA’s offices in Toronto, at least one of which was given by my Chris Hadfield, who at the time had been up in space twice and was the first Canadian to do a spacewalk. In July of 2005 I flew down to Florida and drove to Cocoa Beach, a tiny surfing town off the coast about 15 kms south of Kennedy Space Center, known for surfing and for being the home of the sexy genie in the TV show I Dream of Jeannie. By sheer coincidence, I wound up staying at what I thought was a nondescript chain motel, but turned out to be a motel that used to be owned by the five original Apollo astronauts. The story I heard (which I never confirmed) was that they used to stay across the street at the Holiday Inn, and then a friend said that if the whole space thing took off they might want their own hotel, so they built one. The only evidence was a small plaque out by the tiny swimming pool.

I have a number of memories of that trip, not all of them good — including having a migraine and deciding to go for a swim in the ocean and then getting hit by a rogue wave that tore my glasses off my face and took them god knows where. I would up having to use a backup pair of old contact lenses for the whole trip. I also recall vividly having to wake up at 5 am to make it to the press collection area (a field) where I was scanned and then approved to get on one of a dozen or so military buses that took us out to Cape Canaveral — and while we were driving there, a military helicopter flew over with no doors and guys leaning out with machine guns, and someone told me that President George Bush was there.

When we got to the Space Center I remember wondering how on earth they got anything done, let alone put people into space: the shuttle storage center, where the shuttle got wheeled into and out of, was a three-story building at the center of the facility and was missing a bunch of exterior paneling because of a recent hurricane; the administration area of launch control included half a dozen ratty-looking portable trailers, and the “press center” amounted to a collection of ancient green office chairs that looked like they were from the 1950s, some wooden study carrels like you would find at a small-town library, and a dozen ancient black rotary-dial telephones. Somehow they had jury-rigged modem connections to these old phones so that we could file our stories. But we didn’t need them right away because the launch was put on hold while they checked and rechecked the tiles and power systems of the shuttle because there were anomalies.

Eventually, they agreed that the shuttle was ready to launch, and it was definitely a spectacular event. Watching the liftoff even from several miles away was amazing, and just as I had expected from reading about it, car alarms went off in the Kennedy parking lot from the earth-shaking impact of the shuttle engines firing. But during the day or so we spent waiting to see if the shuttle would launch, I got to spend some time with Chris Hadfield, which was a lot of fun — he was a genuinely nice man with tons of stories about flying the shuttle (some of which made it into my story) and about being in a band called The Astronauts, where every member had been to space. During that time I also got to ask some of the other astronauts who were roaming around questions, and one of them was Marc Garneau. The shuttle astronauts had all suited up for the planned launch and then spent hours lying on their backs in the shuttle with nothing to do, so I asked Marc what goes through your mind when you are waiting in that position for hours.

First, he said, you think about all the things you may have forgotten to do at home, like mow the lawn or pay the bills or alphabetize your CD collection. And then you might think about whether you had prepared things for your potential demise — wills and estate things, or what impact your death might have on relatives, etc. And what about after those topics were exhausted, I asked? Then, he said with a big grin, it was “pretty much just dirty jokes” on the secure communications channel with ground control in Houston. Garneau even confessed that he had actually prepared in advance for this kind of delay by trying to memorize some of the best or dirtiest jokes in order to amuse the others on ground control, and that he kept hoping he wouldn’t accidentally hit the button and send his jokes to the public channel. And with another big smile he was gone.