There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? The headline reads “How Canadian technology could protect Space Force troops” and I clicked on the headline.
I’m all for publicizing a project, but last weeks post on The Conversation by Fiona McNeill, a professor of Radiation Sciences at McMaster University, was really stretching the goal of the article by using the topic of the Space Force to push the Universities NEUDOSE CubeSat effort.
The NEUDOSE program at McMaster University looks like a very good program. NEUDOSE is a radiation detector that would benefit astronauts working in space.
Maybe McNeill was just having some fun with the proposed U.S. Space Force. After all, if you read the U.S. Department of Defense organizational plan for the new Space Force, it doesn’t mention space troops or astronauts, and the warfighters would be ground based personnel.
NEUDOSE has already had some success having successfully completed a balloon mission using NASA’s High Altitude Student Platform (HASP) and it was selected by the Canadian Space Agency as part of the Canadian CubeSat Project to fly in 2021.
Radiation in space and the effects on the human body is a very important topic.
Perhaps McNeill could have published the article focusing on how the technology could be used in the cislunar effort as humanity heads back to the moon. How it could become a needed technology that Canada could contribute to the effort. That would have had more relevance than the Space Force angle. Regardless, McNeill did get publicity for the project.