Speaker
Description
A LCA study was conducted with the aim of quantitatively assessing the recurrent environmental impacts of the Galileo Second Generation Satellites, in particular the batch 1 of this mission, which has as Lead System Integrator (LSI) Airbus DS.
The functional unit (FU) of this study is the “The definition, manufacturing, integration, qualification, testing and preparation for launch of the Galileo Second Generation Satellite Batch 1 space segment to fulfil its requirements”. The G2G constellation will include 30 S/C, out of which 6 are supplied by Airbus under the current contract. The reference flow considered for the purpose of this study was “one G2G space segment”, that was expressed in two forms, namely at PFM and at FM2 level.
For the purpose of this study, primary data has been collected for the following elements: equipment and propellant composition, a number of manufacturing processes, testing sequences at equipment and satellite level, AIT and transport schedules, labour hours and travelling. For a limited number of equipment, a similarity strategy was established between G2G equipment and the equipment integrating the design of the CRISTAL and LSTM space segments, in order to scale an appropriate LCI. For all the elements where primary or similar equipment data was not available, proxies have been used in line with the recommendations of ESA LCA Handbook. Dedicated LCI datasets have been created accordingly.
The LCIA results have shown that the environmental profile is dominated, both for the PFM and for the FM2, by the AIT phase, Equipment manufacturing phase and the Staff labour hours. Environmental hotspots were identified by means of the PEF EF3.0 methodology and lay mainly in the impact categories Resource use, fossil and Ecotoxicity, freshwater.
Eco-design improvement potentials have been proposed, as well as recommendations for methodology optimisation of LCA studies at space segment level.
