Space sustainability-by-design: challenges and key-enablers

Sustainable systems aim to make a proper use of natural resources taking into account the socio-ecological impact, i.e. the depletion of the environmental resources and the ethical impact of a new system in terms of human rights and human development. Space systems provide services having a positive impact in terms of social sustainability, e.g. Internet access to every human, emergency services in incident areas and smart transportation for the reduction of CO2 emissions. On the other hand, space systems have a negative impact both on Earth and Space environment. Space is a key natural resource of the Earth and it must be protected. Current efforts for a sustainable use of Space are mainly in the direction of mitigating damages that have already been generated. This paper points out that there is an urgent need to consider sustainability aspects of future space systems starting from the preliminary design phases: we call it sustainability-by-design. In particular, we focus on the design of a more general communication infrastructure where Space Information Networks (SINs) are integrated with the terrestrial component. The paper discusses the concept of software-defined pervasiveness as key element of the proposed design approach and discusses related enablers including the availability of mm-waves and optical connectivity of the space nodes.