Speakers
Description
For over a decade, the European space sector has sought to better quantify its environmental footprint. By integrating specific contractual requirements for Large System Integrators (LSIs) and conducting dedicated studies, ESA has successfully institutionalized Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within the industry. Building on the experience of previous works, recent LCA studies of missions such as FORUM or Galileo have established a robust baseline for understanding mission-related impacts and have significantly bolstered the ESA LCA Database with consolidated datasets.
However, these works have also highlighted significant data quality gaps,particularly regarding the complex activity sequences within Manufacturing, Assembly, Integration, and Tests (MAIT) at the equipment and subsystem levels. This lack of granular data is doubly detrimental: it reduces the reliability of satellite-level assessments and hinders the use of environmental performance as a meaningful decision-making parameter for ecodesign mitigation strategies.
To address these challenges, the ESA GMAIT Study ("Towards Greener Manufacturing, Assembly, Integration and Test") combined detailed cradle-to-gate LCAs with a pioneering ecodesign ideation and evaluation phase. This project focused on five core platform components: Propulsion System, Solar Array, Battery, Heat Pipes and Star Tracker.
This presentation will detail the methodology and results of the GMAIT study, highlighting the deployed ecodesign approach and its outcomes, as well as discussing some lessons learnt.