Speaker
Description
The “Space system Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) guidelines” (or ESA LCA Handbook) was developed by ESA with the goal of establishing methodological rules for performing space-specific LCAs. General rules for LCA are set in the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards. However, these standards are not sector specific and leave many options open for the LCA practitioner to decide. To obtain comparable results, further guidance is thus needed. ESA also developed a LCI (life cycle inventory) database with space specific materials and processes.
During the ecodesign of the PROBA-V mission in the GreenSat project, the ESA LCA handbook and database are applied. This presentation will discuss the advantages and added value of both tools when performing space system LCA studies. The presentation will also touch upon possibilities for improvement of the ESA LCA Handbook and the ESA database, using concrete examples encountered while performing the PROBA-V life cycle assessment.
