40 years ago this week, Marc Garneau became the first Canadian – and the first Quebecer – to fly into space. The documentary Space Mission 84 looks back on this astonishing adventure, presented by aerospace engineer Farah Alibay.
You have to have at least a few gray hairs to remember the enthusiasm generated by the STS-41-G mission, that is to say the first space flight with a Canadian astronaut on board. The emotion was particularly palpable in Quebec, since the elected official was one of our fellow citizens, Marc Garneau.
Director Louis Asselin, at the helm of Space Mission 84presented Saturday at Historia, is too young to remember these events. He knew Marc Garneau as a federal minister long before becoming aware of the place he occupies in Canadian space history.
“I did not expect to discover such a capacity for wonder [chez lui]admits the filmmaker. When he talks about this period of his life, he has stars in his eyes and we are light years away from the wooden language of politicians. »
An elected official under pressure
Space Mission 84 chronologically recounts the events that propelled Marc Garneau into orbit around the Earth. The documentary looks back at the circumstances that opened the doors of NASA to local astronauts and the exceptional nature of the journey of the Canadian astronaut, who was selected among thousands of candidates across the country and was subsequently designated as the first to leave in his small group of chosen ones.
“When I was chosen, I realized that my responsibilities as the first Canadian were even more enormous,” he says to the camera. The historian Claude Lafleur, whose interventions are always enlightening, also points out: if Marc Garneau had blundered during his journey, he could have called into question Canada’s future participation in NASA missions…
IMAGE FROM SPACE MISSION 84
Astronaut Marc Garneau, during the filming of the documentary
The trajectory of the astronaut born in Quebec was not ordinary. The mission for which he had been selected having been brought forward, he would find himself in space after training for barely 10 months, while others prepare for years. David Saint-Jacques, selected in 2009, only flew in 2018, recalls Claude Lafleur.
Mission at risk
The story led by Louis Asselin, and presented by Farah Alibay, manages to tie together the human and technological parts of Marc Garneau’s adventure. One does not exist without the other, in fact, when it comes to space exploration. In the early 1980s, the shuttles flew with computer systems invented in the late 1970s. They were still considered experimental vehicles. Risk is part of the mission.
IMAGE FROM SPACE MISSION 84
The shuttle Challenger at the time of takeoff, October 5, 1984
Marc Garneau was well aware of this on the morning of October 5, 1984. He also said that while waiting for takeoff, harnessed in the shuttle, he wondered if he had told his wife, his children and his parents enough that he loved them…
Two years later, Challenger exploded seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts on board. “It was the same shuttle,” insists Louis Asselin. The defects that led to the explosion [du vol de 1986] were also in the one where Marc Garneau took his place. »
Space Mission 84 also has a little extra humanity due to another unusual detail: Philippe Garneau, Marc’s brother, also appears in the documentary, because he improvised as a journalist and followed his eldest’s journey to Houston for a Montreal radio station. By a strange twist of chance, he even had the opportunity to ask the very first question addressed to the crew in orbit during the 1984 flight.
“I have the impression that there was something that was more in the nature of a social project,” muses the director, speaking of NASA missions in the 1980s. Nowadays, the conquest of space resembles more from his point of view “a competition of who can piss the furthest”, between two multi-billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who both manufacture spacecraft.
However, space exploration, as Marc Garneau experienced it, is the complete opposite of an ego affair. “It’s something that transforms us,” he confides to the documentary maker. Going around the Earth 16 times a day, seeing all the countries in the world and imagining the conflicts that exist almost everywhere makes us wish that humans would unite to take care of them. “The Earth is our only habitat,” recalls the astronaut, who flew again in 1996 and 2000 aboard the shuttle Endeavor.
On Historia, Saturday, 8 p.m.