MONTREAL — There’s been a lot of attention lately on one of the world’s big mouths and his vision for space flight. It might be more profitable to listen to the thinking of one of the quiet men who knew, from hard-won experience, about travel in space, the meaning of such voyages, and the lessons we on Earth might learn from them.

The sad thing is that we can no longer hear those accounts and those lessons firsthand, for Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut, died Wednesday at 76. You might think of him as Canada’s ambassador to the heavens.

“Whenever I wasn’t busy,” Garneau said of his first flight, in 1984, “I pressed my nose against the window.”

His American colleagues specialized in anodyne descriptions of what they saw out the window; the best that John H. Glenn, Jr., could provid

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