Retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut Marc Garneau describes the time he picked up a spinning satellite in space known as Spartan 207. Garneau retrieved the satellite in May 1996 during space shuttle mission STS-77, using the Canadarm. Garneau was speaking to Space.com on the 40th anniversary of his first spaceflight, also Canada's first, in 1984.
Credit: Space.com | NASA | edited by Steve Spaleta
Credit: Space.com | NASA | edited by Steve Spaleta
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00:00And if I had to single out one single moment that gave me the greatest pride in my three
00:10missions, it was on the second mission when I had to capture a free-flying spacecraft
00:16called Spartan 207, which we had released a couple of days before and which we had to
00:23now recover and bring back to Earth.
00:29Endeavor, Houston for Spartan.
00:31Go ahead.
00:34Yeah, at this point, what we'd like to do real quickly is see if we can get a view of the
00:42top of the Spartan and then go ahead and proceed with the berth and RMS power down.
00:48Okay.
00:49And that's exactly where we were going, Bill.
00:53We're locating it now.
00:56Thanks, John.
00:57You got a good downlink.
01:01Affirmative.
01:02And this is really when the rubber hits the road, you have to capture it.
01:12And it's different from capturing a payload that's in the payload bay that's fixed.
01:19If you aren't successful, the payload you're trying to grab is not going to go anywhere.
01:25But if you make a mistake trying to grab a free-flying satellite, and remember, you and
01:31the orbiter are both moving around the Earth in tandem at 28,000 kilometers per hour.
01:37But if you do it wrongly, there's the potential for you to cause unwanted motion in your spacecraft.
01:43And then it's an extremely challenging task to be able to recover it after that.
01:49So I felt that was the moment when I really had to be successful.
01:55And it's the moment it worked out.
01:57And it gave me a huge amount of pride being a Canadian to operate that Canadarm and to capture a free-flying payload.
02:07Oh, that's pretty cool.
02:11I'm very happy to get in here.
02:13Come here.
02:15I'm very happy to become a Canadian to highlight this video.
02:17We're lucky to be hungry for a man.
02:19I'm lucky to have to go there.
02:21We'll be happy to be.
02:22We're lucky to be.
02:23Come here, you.
02:24I'm lucky to be.
02:25Have a hard time with the sun.
02:27We can even reach for a week.
02:29I had a huge amount of trouble.
02:31We've seen a little bit.
02:33We got pretty crazy.
02:34We're lucky.
02:35We'll be, like, you know,