TY  - JOUR
ID  - discovery10199560
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su16219431
N2  - The growing amount of space debris in the low Earth orbit poses a danger to manned as well as uncrewed missions. Additionally, the new business model of providing internet from space is emerging among new space players, making low Earth orbit more crowded. These factors have encouraged the space community to focus on sustainability in space. Satellite manufacturers typically have the capability to perform complete life cycle analysis (LCA) on their own products based on the manufacturing data. However, there is a lack of a method for non-manufacturers such as environmentalists and the general public to predict the carbon footprint of satellite manufacturing using a subsystem-level mass budget. Hence, this paper presents a method to quantify environmental pollution caused by the production of satellite constellations. Starlink is taken as a case study in this paper, and mass budget is predicted based on space systems engineering budget estimation techniques, the parametric method, and Federal Communication Commission orbital data. With the budget table used as an input, space-specific life cycle assessment is performed based on European Space Agency?s life cycle inventory database. Finally, the single score for Starlink constellation version 1 was found to be 76 kilo points. This signifies the annual environmental load. These results could be helpful in obtaining an overview of the environmental effects of the production phase of satellite constellations. Further, the results could act as a foundation for further research on implementing more circular approach practices on Earth as well as in space.
IS  - 21
AV  - public
SN  - 2071-1050
Y1  - 2024/11/01/
TI  - Quantifying the Environmental Impacts of Manufacturing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Constellations
PB  - MDPI AG
A1  - Kumaran, Sritharan Thirumalai
A1  - Tan, Chekfoung
A1  - Emes, Michael
JF  - Sustainability
KW  - Circular economy; lifecycle assessment; low earth orbit; satellite constellation
VL  - 16
N1  - Copyright © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
ER  -