At The Exploration Company, sustainability is not just a goal—it’s a responsibility and a necessity for the collaborative future that we envision. Below is a glimpse of some of our sustainability projects and top insights so far.
Life Cycle Assessment
To minimize the environmental impact of our projects, we are committed to performing Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) for every major project we undertake. These assessments provide a foundation for identifying key environmental hotspots and help us focus on meaningful improvements. Our preliminary LCA, conducted during the pre-PDR phase of Nyx Earth, has provided valuable initial insights:
The production phase emerged as the largest contributor to environmental impacts, reaffirming our decision to prioritize a reusable capsule design. This ensures that production burdens are distributed across multiple flights.
The refurbishment phase ranked as the second largest contributor, with the need to replace thermal protection driving much of the impact. Our analysis highlighted that even a 1% increase in parts needing refurbishment significantly increases CO2 emissions, guiding us to limit the number of parts requiring replacement while maintaining performance and safety.
Mission logistics, particularly air travel to launch sites, also surfaced as a critical area for improvement.
While these insights provide a solid starting point, we recognize the need for more specific data and deeper analysis to define our path forward with precision. By the end of summer 2025, we will therefore conduct another iteration of our LCA, incorporating the more detailed Nyx Earth design, as well as input from our suppliers. Based on the outcomes of the updated LCA, we should have more accurate calculations that we can use to clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to guide and track our progress toward reducing our environmental footprint.
We are actively engaged in the PEFCR4Space Technical Secretariat for the European Commission, striving to ensure a standardized approach to LCA across the space industry in the EU. This is essential to enable transparency, reliability and comparability among LCA of all players in the sector. Given Nyx is the first capsule we know of to measure its LCA and as part of our commitment to transparency, we have shared more information on the preliminary LCA results for Nyx Earth, along with our current eco-design principles, in line with the IAC 2024:Bergmann, N., Koop, A., Wong, L., Veggi, L. & Lemoine, T. (2024). Sustainability in Space Logistics at The Exploration Company, 75th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Milan, 2024. Copyright ©2024 by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
Eco-Design Principles
To make impact reductions as straightforward as possible for our engineering teams, we are developing a set of eco-design principles. These principles, rooted in literature research and informed by best practices in the sector, aim to provide clear and actionable guidance for integrating sustainability into every stage of the process. Currently, the preliminary principles are organized around six key areas of opportunity: Materials, Production Processes, Operations and Testing, Transport, Electricity, and Launcher Selection and Propulsion Systems. They address not only design decisions, such as material choices and manufacturing processes, but also day-to-day engineering and facility operations.
Examples include:
Avoiding the use of critical raw elements and REACH-targeted substances.
Minimizing the quantity of gold wire bonding on Printed Circuit Boards.
Using chemicals with only the minimum required purity.
Ensuring all facilities operate with a sustainable energy mix.
Optimizing ground data management to reduce energy and resource use.
As a next step, the preliminary principles will be the basis for us to create a practical template to incorporate sustainability into our technical trade-offs. Our aim is to ensure that environmental considerations are part of the choices that we make across all ongoing and future projects.
"Greener" Low-Toxicity Propulsion
Over the last two years, our propulsion team has worked on a propulsion system meant to provide a "greener" and less toxic propellant option for our vehicles and the industry at large. Great progress has been made with:
The definition of a conceptual propulsion system architecture and related development plans for the system and its sub-system.
The maturation of a 200 N bipropellant hypergolic thruster - our "Mistral" engine - using additively manufactured part.
The design, assembly, and commissioning of an atmospheric test bench, as well as successive Mistral engine hot firing campaigns.
Although originally intended for our Nyx Earth maiden flight in 2028, it became clear in recent months that we would not achieve the necessary TRL in time for this mission. To hold the schedule for our first flight, we decided to move forward with traditional propellants for the Nyx Earth maiden flight, while continuing the development of our less toxic propulsion system and Mistral engine for future vehicles.
We have learned a lot from this work thus far, with some key insights outlined below:
Reliable data on low-toxicity propellants (e.g., chemical characterization, material compatibility, cleanliness procedures or standards) is lacking in literature or is restricted. Therefore, considerable efforts are required to build these types of databases, and they are not widely shared among system or component developers.
Some less toxic propellants exhibit thermal sensitivities that can be more constraining than toxic propellants, making temperature control a critical element of the spacecraft design.
Demonstrating thrusters in a vacuum environment presents a significant challenge due to the limitations of existing test facilities and ground support equipment, which are primarily designed for more conventional propellants.
Addressing these challenges will be an important part of our continued green propulsion system development for capsules and vehicles with different mission profiles, further demonstrating The Exploration Company's commitment to sustainability.
