Honorary doctorate
Philip Somers helped set up space science degree program at Royal Military College
Lt.-Col. (Retired) Philip Somers from Kensington, the driving force behind the creation of the space science degree program at the Royal Military College of Canada, received an honorary doctorate from the college.
Lt.-Col. (Retired) Philip Somers was the driving force behind the creation of the space science degree program at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), and last week, the college conferred an honorary doctorate upon the Kensington, P.E.I., native.
He has been a leader and researcher in space science in the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence since 1984. Somers, who grew up in Kensington, enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1966, graduating with a bachelor of science in 1971. He became a tactical helicopter and long-range maritime patrol pilot accumulating 5,000 hours flying.
In 1986, he graduated from the United States Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, with a master of science degree in space operations and was posted to the United States Air Force Space Command in space-based missile warning. Somers put forward a proposal that RMC could offer specialized degrees in space science and space operations to meet the CAF requirement. In 1988, Somers was posted to National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) Ottawa as staff officer space plans. During this posting, he acted as an expert advisor in, and promoter of, the development of an undergraduate space science program at RMC.
Somers was instrumental in setting up the RMC Centre for Space Research, the Space Surveillance Research and Analysis Laboratory and the Canadian Automated Small Telescope for Orbital Research system. Somers retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in 1994, but remained at RMC to conduct satellite tracking and new surveillance-from-space research until 1998 when he joined the Directorate of Space Development in NDHQ.
He was later posted to the Defence Research Establishment Ottawa (DREO) for two years, where he put in place the project which produced the current Ground Based Optical (GBO) space surveillance system. The GBO was in turn a stepping stone to another initiative begun by Somers, a space-based telescope called NEOSSat to demonstrate the capability to track satellites from space. In 2001, Somers took up a new position at the NATO Consultation Command and Control Agency in The Hague, Netherlands, as principal scientist for early warning and sensors for NATO’s new ballistic missile defence system where he served for six years. In 2008 he became adjunct assistant professor of physics at RMC where he works primarily with space science graduate students.