Speakers
Description
VITO has performed LCA studies for space missions over consecutive phases of development (from A, B1, B2 over C/D). The CO2M mission is one example where we started assessing the environmental impact already during the early stages of development and continuously update the environmental profiles in different iterations to improve the quality of the results and conclusions.
This presentation will build on the experiences with this iterative approach to illustrate how the LCA process follows the space mission development phases, to share key learnings on how to perform this process as efficiently as possible and how this changes the results. We will discuss for example data quality, data gaps and data quality assessment and focus on how to make the data collection and LCA model improvement more effective. Also the hot spot identification and role of ecodesign will be discussed. We will relate, where relevant, to different initiatives from ESA to support LCA for space missions, such as the update of the ESA database and the harmonization of the data questionnaire.
