A life cycle assessment study of European Space Agency's space tracking terminal†

The transition to a low-carbon and resource-efficient circular economy is a political pillar of the EU and a priority for space agencies. Indeed, the space industry is pursuing sustainable development practices to reduce the environmental impacts. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is internationally recognized as the most appropriate methodology to estimate the environmental impacts of products, processes, and services and to evaluate the effectiveness of sustainability strategies related to reducing these negative externalities. To support the European Space Agency (ESA) in the process of planning more sustainable eco-design solutions, the objective of this paper is the development of a cradle-to-grave screening LCA study to assess the environmental impacts concerning the ESA's ground-based satellite tracking system based in New Norcia (AU) along its entire life cycle, including the tracking antenna and the photovoltaic panels. This scenario has been compared with 2 other scenarios to verify whether the use of photovoltaic panels has a benefit in terms of environmental impact (scenario A) and to understand the consequences in changing the location of the station, from New Norcia to Cebreros (E) by considering the change in the national energy mix from the Australian to the Spanish (scenario B). This study is one of the first attempts to apply the LCA methodology to the space sector, and its results, conducted according to ISO 14040/44 2021 guidelines and by means of the ReCiPe calculation method (2016), will be exploited by the ESA to plan a more sustainable eco-design for the construction of future space tracking stations.