Speakers
Description
The European Space Agency (ESA) aims to address critical societal needs with its space programmes, while championing responsible space activities. In its strategy towards 2040, the Agency is committed to minimise the environmental impacts of its own operations, both on Earth and in space. With over a decade of experience in conducting Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) of its space programmes, in collaboration with industry partners, ESA has focussed on identifying environmental hotspots and ultimately integrating ecodesign alternatives into mission designs.
A notable success of the ESA Green Agenda programme is the entry into Force of the ESA Ecodesign Policy. The policy moves ESA from “measuring impacts” to systematically acting on them, by integrating lifecycle thinking into procurement and project implementation.
Against this backdrop, ESA contracted Novaspace, VITO and Thales Alenia Space (the consortium) to evaluate the programmatic impact of conducting life cycle thinking and implementing ecodesign measures in space programmes based on ESA’s policies, both for the Agency and its suppliers.
The consortium approached this project via three main tasks:
1. Benchmarking programmatic impact and best practice from other sectors (namely automotive, battery technologies and construction because of key parallels with the space sector, e.g., linked to complexity, development timescales & innovation),
2. Conducting a detailed programmatic impact assessment within the space sector, and
3. Developing recommendations towards potential actions to mitigate such programmatic impacts.
The results indicate that while progress has been made in developing LCA practices, accelerating ecodesign implementation will require stronger integration into governance processes, improved coordination across programmes and supply chains, and earlier engagement with industry. Also, the study showed that ESA is uniquely positioned to drive this integration across programmes, supply chains and industry standards.
The presentation will delve into the context of the study, the key results including learnings from the benchmarking and the assessment; and explore resulting recommendations to reduce programmatic impacts for both ESA and suppliers.