Speaker
Description
MaiaSpace is a European space tech company, designing, manufacturing and operating more sustainable space transportation solutions. It is driven by the belief that space stands as a major enabler for a better and more sustainable life on Earth, contributing to future challenges mankind is facing: climate change, resources run out, digital divide, data collection. Its first and primary focus is on flying a reusable, eco-responsible and competitive launcher by 2026 and its objective is to become a space mobility champion. This launcher will be propelled by liquid oxygen and biomethane thanks to four Prometheus engines, already under development by ArianeGroup on behalf of ESA, and its first stage will be derived from Themis, a reusable lower-stage demonstrator, also being developed by ArianeGroup for ESA. MaiaSpace has the ambition to have the best impact of the industry on the Earth and space environments. Realizing this ambition has a cost and requires a strong sustainability engineering approach at all levels of the company. To achieve this, MaiaSpace has been evaluating the environmental impacts of its launch service through a Life Cycle Assessment model since day one, which has been updated and consolidated since. In addition, due to the current limitations of existing reference methods for launchers LCA and ecodesign, a methodology was developed to address some major issues. It includes the management of reusability in LCA and the derivation of characterization factors that provide a rough order of magnitude estimate of the effect of high-altitude emissions on climate change. MaiaSpace has initiated and will co-fund a PhD project to better understand these high-altitude effects. Based on this baseline LCA model and this methodology, MaiaSpace has set itself environmental targets and is implementing an ecodesign strategy to achieve them. To this aim, a set of tools were developed to manage costs and environmental impacts in a consistent way to efficiently support targets monitoring and decision-making. A few design trade-offs were successfully realized by incorporating environmental impacts indicators in the process. After 1.5 years of setting up and implementing ecodesign on a real project, MaiaSpace can provide a valuable return on experience by highlighting difficulties and sharing successes, and underlines the importance of setting a methodological standard to evaluate and compare the environmental performance of launchers.
