To assess the environment impacts of space missions, ESA’s Clean Space initiative began by looking at the impact of launchers then progressed to the entire mission life-cycle: from design to demise. So began the Eco-design initiative. Clean Space has developed methods to assess the environmental consequences of each phase of a space mission, resulting in a ‘life cycle assessment’ method that is being applied to all future ESA missions before their design begins.

To learn more about Clean Space, check out the team's blog