“Star Wars, Eh?”: Canadian Aerospace Policy and the Militarization of Outer Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadians rightly pride themselves on their technological achievements in outer space. Heralded as a pioneer with several “firsts” in space exploration, public perception is that Canada explores the “final frontier” in the name of peace. This is the myth perpetuated by scientists and politicians alike, distorting clear evidence to the contrary. This study aims to rectify this fallacy by demonstrating that Canadian space initiatives were a product of Cold War relations, a need for domestic and international security against the threat of nuclear war. Contextualized within the paradigm of a bipolar world, an ostensibly civilian space program only thinly veiled military objectives. Consulting military, political and scientific sources from the end of the Second World War to contemporary conflicts, what emerges is a complex relationship between civilian and military initiatives. Balancing demands from the United States for hemispheric security against the increasing threat of the Soviet Union whilst maintaining sovereignty over Canadian territory presented immense challenges to government leaders. Coupled with a shrinking defence budget, space research fulfilled specific niche roles in Canadian‐American relations. Deconstructing the objectives of prominent satellite programs, Canada‐U.S. (CANUS) agreements, and concomitant government sponsored defence research into theoretical space programs reveals policy marked by the vestiges of war. Peaceful orientations toward outer space perpetuated in historical literature sets a dangerous precedent. Future conflicts will not always pit technologically advanced societies against underdeveloped armies, and ignoring the military advantages of outer space could prove a fatal mistake in confrontations that will assuredly come.Defence in
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".