Life Cycle Assessment of the Copernicus CO2M Flight Calibration Unit developed at the Centre Spatial de Liège Centre Spatial de Liège

Abstract

The space industry is experiencing an ecological awakening, mainly led by European stakeholders. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was deemed, by the European Space Agency (ESA), to be the most suitable tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of space activities. Unfortunately, the available literature is scarce, and often exhibits a lack of transparency, due to the high confidentiality requirements of the space sector. Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL) is one of the main stakeholders of the space industry in Belgium. Given its lack of LCA expertise, it has thus decided to take the lead by conducting its first LCA on the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) Flight Calibration Unit (FCU) project, within the context of a Master’s thesis at Université de Liège (ULiège). This study aims to identify the environmental hotspots linked to CSL’s activities, and to reveal the potential barriers that prevent CSL from performing an LCA in proper conditions. In addition, the completion of this LCA hopes to play a part in the growing ecological awareness of the space sector by being as transparent as possible, to help future LCA practitioners by filling a gap in the literature. A cradle-to-gate approach was used, since CSL’s involvement ends at the delivery of the three flight models to Thales Alenia Space (TAS), the prime contractor of the project. The LCA database and handbook developed by ESA were extensively used to conduct this LCA, as well as the first draft of the PEFCR4Space. The functional unit is “three flight FCU models delivered to TAS”. Since the second and third flight models were still under development at the time the study was executed, the impacts linked to the first flight model were extrapolated to the other two flight models. The main challenge that was encountered in this LCA was the lack of primary data at CSL, since the entire organization of the facility was not designed to permit primary data collection. This proved to be a significant issue for the modelling of CSL’s ISO 7 clean rooms. Furthermore, given the high volume of the clean rooms (15 500 m3), many projects are simultaneously present in the clean room, which rendered the allocation problem very complex. This LCA identified multiple environmental hotspots, primarily impacting the following impact cate- gories: Resource use, energy carriers (ADEPLf), Resource use, minerals and metals (ADEPLmu), Climate change (GWP), Acidification EF (ACIDef), and Water use (WDEPL). The main contributor is the electricity consumption linked to the clean rooms of CSL that were extensively used for the Assembly, Integration, Verification (AIV) activities of the FCU models. Other hotspots are the sheer amount of staff hours spent on the project, leading to a high consumption of energy for the offices and the commuting of the staff; the Thermal Vacuum Cycling (TVAC) testing activities, due to the high consumption of liquid nitrogen, whose production includes energy-intensive processes; the raw materials, which are heavily used to manufacture the models, due to the very high production losses associated with conventional machining processes.