eprintid: 10199560 rev_number: 7 eprint_status: archive userid: 699 dir: disk0/10/19/95/60 datestamp: 2024-11-05 09:26:42 lastmod: 2024-11-05 09:26:42 status_changed: 2024-11-05 09:26:42 type: article metadata_visibility: show sword_depositor: 699 creators_name: Kumaran, Sritharan Thirumalai creators_name: Tan, Chekfoung creators_name: Emes, Michael title: Quantifying the Environmental Impacts of Manufacturing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Constellations ispublished: pub divisions: UCL divisions: B04 divisions: C06 divisions: F63 keywords: Circular economy; lifecycle assessment; low earth orbit; satellite constellation note: 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/). abstract: 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. date: 2024-11-01 date_type: published publisher: MDPI AG official_url: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su16219431 oa_status: green full_text_type: pub language: eng primo: open primo_central: open_green verified: verified_manual elements_id: 2332839 doi: 10.3390/su16219431 lyricists_name: Tan, Chekfoung lyricists_name: Emes, Michael lyricists_id: CTANA07 lyricists_id: MREME29 actors_name: Tan, Chekfoung actors_id: CTANA07 actors_role: owner full_text_status: public publication: Sustainability volume: 16 number: 21 article_number: 9431 issn: 2071-1050 citation: Kumaran, Sritharan Thirumalai; Tan, Chekfoung; Emes, Michael; (2024) Quantifying the Environmental Impacts of Manufacturing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Constellations. Sustainability , 16 (21) , Article 9431. 10.3390/su16219431 <https://doi.org/10.3390/su16219431>. Green open access document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10199560/1/sustainability-16-09431.pdf