Improving the sustainability of operations is vital in the space field as in other industrial fields. This project for the European Space Agency was a broad-based review to highlight ways and means of improving the agency's sustainability credentials against a background of increasingly stringent pan-European standards. Space presents special challenges with operations that generate environmental pollution, waste and hazards, some of which are unique to Europe. The fabrication of spacecraft and satellites involves unsustainable and sometimes toxic materials for which there are no benign substitutes. In Europe's case, spacecraft and payloads must be shipped a long distance by sea to the launch site in South America. Rocket launches generate combustion gases and corrosive clouds. There is no recovery of jettisoned stages in European launchers (in contrast to the reusable launch vehicles of SpaceX).

There are ecologically friendly treatments of launch sites as Kennedy Space Centre shows with the managed care of its coastal wetlands (photo top right). Then there is a disregard of the impact of waste on a vast local landscape as at the Baikonur launch complex in Kazakhstan (photo bottom right). Many of the challenges are solvable and for an agency the size of ESA, the question is how effectively and rapidly they can be implemented in an industrial field that is susceptible to institutional inertia. The review produced an analytical tool covering the life cycle of space projects and missions from concept to launch. The tool can help to track and evaluate the sustainability performance and 'green' record of space industries and companies from large to small in size as they undertake contract work for ESA. The tool's first application was a set of simple space sustainability guidelines - a checklist for good practices.