Sustaining space: An Integrated Engineering Evaluation of Governance Structures, Industrial Chemical Risk, and Launch Vehicle Sustainability

This praxis develops an integrated, systems-level framework for aerospace sustainability by connecting governance, industrial chemical risk, and launch vehicle engineering analysis into a unified evaluation. Existing scholarship approaches these domains individually, but this fragmented approach obscures the interactions that shape sustainability across the full lifecycle of aerospace activity. To address this gap, this research advances three objectives. First, it proposes domain-specific threshold-based governance continua to evaluate sub-domains of outer space and identify structural deficiencies in current domain management tools. Second, it examines Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data from 1987 to 2024 to characterize trends, regulatory drivers, and comparative toxicity profiles for specific hazardous substances, demonstrating how terrestrial industrial decisions impact upstream sustainability. Third, it introduces a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) sustainability framework for launch vehicles that integrates life-cycle environmental impacts, orbital debris modeling, local ecological effects, and mission performance. A case study of the Falcon 9 shows how design choices, reusability strategies, and operational behavior interact to produce non-intuitive, system-wide sustainability tradeoffs. Across these analyses, the praxis demonstrates that sustainable space operations require governance mechanisms that are informed by engineering thresholds, quantified risk, and dynamic industrial and orbital environments. The findings show that sustainability challenges are expressions of a single interconnected system spanning Earth and space. The integrated framework developed here lays essential groundwork for future policy design, technical decision-making, and interdisciplinary research that support long-term, resilient, and responsible use of outer space.