A life cycle assessment of alternative materials for a cubesat manufacturing

Despite the current concerns about the environmental impact of terrestrial applications, regulations and sustainability guidelines have not focused their attention on the space sector yet, preventing the establishment of standards and uniformity of this topic in the field. After the small satellite industry's growth in the commercial sphere, the focus on the environmental impact has become extremely important, since more players are going to play crucial roles in the next future. In the last few years this situation started to change, as life cycle assessment (LCA) has been identified as a suitable sustainability framework to evaluate the potential impact of space missions. In this perspective, LCA has been adapted to include orbital occupation as a natural resource depletion to be accounted for, when dealing with spacecraft development, manufacturing, operation and disposal. At present, few studies have applied LCA techniques to the space industry processes and products, as the intrinsic complexity of space operations make it a challenging task, particularly when dealing with primary data acquisition. In this contribution, several materials for the manufacturing of a cubesat structural bus have been considered and compared based on their environmental impact. This comparative cradle-to-grave analysis included the whole life cycle of the products, from raw materials extraction and refinement, transportations, manufacturing of the structure, orbit operational phase and end-of-life. Three materials have been used for satellite manufacturing, i.e., traditional aluminium, 3Dprinted PEEK, and 3D-printed Liquid-Crystal Polymer (LCP). The system boundary of the study excluded the elements that are shared between the alternative structures, such as the “launch” and the “ground and support” segments. Background information have been retrieved within ecoinvent database using openLCA. The outcomes of the study have been evaluated using ReCiPe 2016 methodology, which was integrated using an additional impact category related to the orbit occupation. None of the formulations outperformed the others in every impact category, hence a compromise must be found in order to identify the most sustainable option. The adoption of LCA at an early-design stage of space systems is therefore a fundamental step for a responsible and sustainable exploitation of terrestrial and orbital resources.