Speaker
Description
Life-cycle assessment (LCA) provides a strong basis for quantifying the environmental impact of space systems, but its application in early design remains difficult because major parameters are still uncertain, including suppliers, production sites, detailed material inventories, and process-level emissions. This work proposes a \textbf{high-level LCA framework for early space systems engineering} that is adapted to conceptual design and concurrent engineering, where rapid trade-offs must be carried out with incomplete information.
The framework is developed within a broader sustainability-by-design approach in which sustainable space systems are evaluated through four main dimensions: environmental impact, operability, safety, and resilience. Within this structure, the role of high-level LCA is to provide an early estimate of environmental impact that is sufficiently robust to support engineering decisions, while remaining simple enough to be used during preliminary design phases.
A central result of the work is that a traditional bottom-up LCA is not well suited to early design in the space sector, mainly because the required databases are incomplete and the uncertainty on industrial implementation is too large. Instead, the proposed approach identifies \textbf{production energy consumption} as a more reliable early-phase indicator than direct carbon-footprint estimation. For mature technologies, manufacturing processes tend to be comparatively stable, whereas the resulting emissions depend strongly on the local energy mix. This motivates the use of technology-level energy demand indicators, expressed in kWh, as a practical proxy for environmental assessment before detailed supply-chain information is available.
The framework is intended as a decision-support method rather than a final environmental certification tool. It enables first-order comparison of mission concepts, subsystem choices, and architecture alternatives, and is designed to become more precise as system maturity increases. Its application in the concurrent engineering course at EPFL shows how such a method can be integrated into real design sessions to inform trade-offs and introduce environmental criteria alongside more traditional performance and cost considerations.
The main contribution of this work is therefore to bridge the gap between sustainability research and practical early-phase space design by proposing a simplified, usable, and engineering-oriented LCA framework. It also highlights an important research need: the development of accessible databases for the production energy demand of space technologies, which would significantly improve the quality and adoption of early-stage environmental assessment methods.