Space weather is a rapidly growing area of research not only in scientific and engineering
applications but also in physics education and in the interest of the public. We focus especially on
space radiation and its impact on space exploration. The topic is highly interdisciplinary, bringing
together fundamental concepts of nuclear physics with aspects of radiation protection and space
science. We give a new approach to presenting the topic by developing a web-based application that
combines some of the fundamental concepts from these two fields into a single tool that can be used
in the context of advanced secondary or undergraduate university education. We present DREADCode, an
outreach or teaching tool to rapidly assess the current conditions of the radiation field in space.
DREADCode uses the available data feeds from a number of ongoing space missions (ACE, GOES-13,
GOES-15) to produce a first order approximation of the radiation dose an astronaut would receive
during a mis…