The ever-growing space sector market brings about new ecological challenges: exponentially increasing launch frequencies, gargantuan orbital constellation projects and unprecedented space exploration programs are worrying both the general public and space industry stakeholders worldwide. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the standardized methodology to examine the environmental impacts of a product or service with the aim to implement ways of reducing them, from their inception, throughout their life cycle. Space actors contribute to the databases and inventories of space-specific activities, and recent initiatives aim at popularizing this practice. Reducing and minimizing environmental impacts through engineering decisions is called Eco-design, and is informed by LCA. However, LCA relies on daunting inventories, conducted when the system life cycle is fully established. Changes in the inventory are complex to track, and datasets tend to be outdated, incomplete, and expensive; finally, current LCA approaches and tools are not suitable for intensive iterations and computations. To make LCA more robust to change and easier to conduct, this paper proposes an innovative framework using Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to overlay the life cycle inventories with a preliminary system model describing the life cycle phases, components and interfacing entities, allowing for Eco-Design complexity management and early validation of sustainability constraints. This paper presents ongoing work on a Ph.D. thesis at ISAE-SUPAERO (Toulouse, France) in partnership with the Spaceship France project of the French Space Agency (CNES), for which a multi-disciplinary framework for the Eco-design of a crewed lunar base is being developed. After a review of existing initiatives in the space sector, model-driven bridging strategies for the aforementioned disciplines will be detailed. Finally, specific environmental impact categories for a crewed lunar base will be discussed, both on Earth and in-situ, such as the extension of existing impact categories to celestial bodies, or the inclusion of new damage indicators.
Gallois et al. (Sun,) studied this question.