Space and the Circular Economy: Exploring Expert Perceptions

Space is facing significant sustainability issues such as space debris generation, light pollution, green-house gas emissions, and ozone layer depletion due to congestion of orbits, increase in rocket launches, and future mega constellations. Without including sustainability in the mission development framework, present and future space activities such as satellite internet networks, space resource utilization, solar power satellites, and space-based climate action could be compromised. To date, space endeavours mostly rely on linear economy principles, following the “make, take, waste”-approach, and literature on how to transition to a circular space economy (CSE) remains limited. However, the implementation of circular economy (CE) principles in space activities requires a radical shift in the way mission concepts and space architectures are developed. A CSE may be crucial to ensuring the sustainable use of space and its resources, while an optimized use of existing and future space assets promises lower long-term costs, in addition to safeguarding sustainability on Earth and in space. The objective of this work is to gather, process, and synthesize qualitative and quantitative data on barriers, enablers, uncertainties, and challenges towards reaching the full circularity potential of the space ecosystem. To this aim, a diverse pool of experts in CE, CSE, and space engineering from universities and research institutes, private sector, and space agencies was included in semi-structured interviews. The result is a first of its kind empirical dataset, which not only provides the ground for further, thorough research, but contributes to the discussion around space sustainability- and CSE-definition, lessons learned from terrestrial CE application, and effects on the space ecosystem. While the expert perceptions diverge on the future grade of circularity implementation, they also express concerns about regulatory aspects--but remain confident in the long term. Broadly speaking, the views differ depending on the organizational and individual backgrounds of the experts, while they align on CSE’s outstanding potential.