Frameworks of sustainability and sustainable development in a spaceflight context: A systematic review and critical analysis

Abstract

Continuous missions to Low-Earth Orbit, Moon and even Mars missions are the prospect for the coming decades of especially human spaceflight. The actors in these missions are commercial and institutional, public and private. The bandwidth of planned missions is wide, ranging from scientific exploration to commercial exploitation. In-situ resource utilization is planned to support such missions and thus reduce the amount of effort needed for transportation of goods to mission regions, e.g. by supplying water or fuel on the lunar or Martian surface. In the past decades the concept of sustainable development and sustainability has been evolved and became more and more relevant for many aspects of human life and society. These terms have also migrated into more specialized fields such as spaceflight. This paper systematically reviews the concepts of sustainable development and sustainability which have been formulated in a spaceflight context implicitly and explicitly. For this purpose, four perspectives are defined which originate from either Earth or space and alternate with the addressed object between Earth and space as well. It is explained and discussed how these concepts manifest in a spaceflight context, how they evolved over time and which implications result from the respective point of view. Subsequently, the formulation of space in-situ sustainable development is coined and an outlook is given how to further evolve this centric idea to enable a comprehensive evaluation of mission scenarios and roadmaps with regard to their sustainability.