Formulating life-cycle-sustainability assessment indicators for space activities from a systematic review and evaluation-based selection process

Abstract Sustainability is an objective that permeates more and more activities and has also begun to enter into spaceflight. Although attention is mainly put towards the environmental impacts of space activities, economic and social aspects also need to be included for sustainability assessments. To measure sustainability impacts in all three dimensions on a product scale, Life-Cycle-Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a typical method in many industries. However, it has not been standardized or regularly implemented for space activities. Aiming at collecting suitable indicators for LCSA for space activities, this paper presents a systematic review about LCSA as applied for space activities and other fields of activities to accommodate all dimensions of sustainability. After obtaining a list of indicators for each sustainability dimension, these were evaluated by actors from the space field for application for space activities and recommended for further use. The results are presented and discussed in this paper.