Sustainability goals for space settlement concept evaluation and development and results of their trial application

Kurzfassung

Comprehensive sustainability assessment of space activities is still a fledging undertaking. Current consensus is that it is most effective to initiate analysing and addressing sustainability impacts as early as possible during a mission or program as most impacts stem from decisions made during the design phase. If future space settlements are to be (nearly) in-situ sustainable they need to be drafted to that purpose as early as possible. Evaluation of sustainability impacts due to space activities is in its infancy, even more so for in-situ outside the boundaries of Earth. This situation is associated with significant knowledge gaps concerning e.g. adaptation of assessment methods to the space context, or sustainability impact data of space engineering specific processes. These gaps significantly limit the ability to determine sustainability impacts and thus formulate mitigations. To bridge these knowledge gaps, within this paper it is shown how an adapted set of sustainability goals has been derived from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) via adaptation, a review process with an expert board, and trial application. These Space-In-Situ Sustainability Goals are meant to provide guidelines for designing large scale missions, human settlements, sustainably and to evaluate mission concepts accordingly, drawing from the heritage of the SDGs. Furthermore, the results of their application on four test cases are shown and ultimately their final iteration, based on that trial application.