What can space lasers do for business broadband?

Like millions of office colleagues, Randy Bresnik, Christina Koch, and Kjell Lindgren swapped a bunch of pictures of their pets in June 2024. Unlike most of us, they worked on the International Space Station at the time, 250 miles overhead. The pictures were sent as part of the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which achieved speeds of around 1.2 GBits/sec.

To many, the pet pics might not be nearly as interesting as the speed. While most internet users get by with 50-100Mbits/sec, over ten times that much sounds like a technical feat that could be used to upgrade business networks.

Part of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, LCRD used the same technology you're using to read this story – lasers. Just like on Earth, the LRDC fires a beam of light blinking on and off to represent the ones and zeroes of binary data, the only difference being the absence of fiber optic cabling.

Just a few years later, the pioneering crew of Artemis II have used a laser communications terminal of their own – the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System – to send 4k footage back to NASA at 260 Mbits/sec, despite being the furthest distance humans have ever been from the Earth.

Better (and faster) cat pictures aside, how do we deploy and maintain a system like that here on Earth? And what might laser internet do for businesses?

Space-based business networks

The commercial possibilities are potentially far reaching. Using systems like Starlink or Amazon Leo, networks of satellites covering every point on Earth's surface, network operators can provide internet anywhere. In the near future, it might be just as easy for businesses to get superfast broadband in rural areas or on planes in flight as it is in urban areas.

On paper, this could one day make subsea internet cables obsolete altogether – large cloud providers like Google or Amazon might network data centers together around the globe from spaceborne transmitters.

We also have an increasing need for low latency internet service. On the stock market, for instance, where milliseconds count, a laser from space might give traders an edge over a light pulse going through a mountain range or across an ocean.

Laser internet also has the means to offer isolated networks that are much more secure and resistant to hijacking or jamming. Militaries or the government could deploy dedicated laser internet systems to coordinate materiel movements or next-gen intelligence communications, as well as safeguard critical national infrastructure

Terrestrial energy and data networks are also very vulnerable to disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, and when coordinating relief or emergency services is critical, a robust network delivered from orbit can keep the lines of communication open no matter what state the infrastructure is in on the ground.

Stumbling blocks

We already have satellite internet, but it uses radio signals (RF), and concentrated light like a laser needs direct line of sight with the receiver, which is a different proposition (a series of way stations covering Earth to ensure each one is visible by the next is beyond our engineering and economic means).

The LRDC experiment itself proved how tricky line of sight can be, as David Israel, Near Space Network chief architect and LCRD principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explains. "Sometimes the solar panels [on the ISS] can themselves be blocking the signal," he says. "If you just have one telescope using [a] very specific line of sight it's very difficult. We don't have the equivalent of antennas that broadcast in all directions."

Even assuming you have a clear line of sight, a laser beam has a lot to get through here on Earth. You can increase the power of an RF signal and circumvent most of the atmospheric effects – we've been doing it with TV and radio for over a century. Not so for lasers. Cloud, wildfire smoke, general pollution and fog can all scatter and obstruct a light beam, and suddenly your internet will be more like dialup.

That's just down here where we live. As Jason Mitchell, principal technologist for Communications and Navigation at NASA, adds, the atmosphere above our heads is a constantly moving soup. "It's surprising how active the upper atmosphere can be. It can result in dramatic changes in the refractive index of a light beam."

But the most surprising stumbling block is actually scheduling. The LRDC platform was in a geosynchronous orbit – the craft stayed overhead the transmitting and receiving stations in Hawaii and California as the earth rotated.

Other SCaN programs have only been possible while the relevant orbiters are passing overhead, and unless you're Elon Musk with over 9,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, achieving global coverage is a big and expensive problem.

But NASA has put a lot of thought into getting around such constraints. Israel talks about a smart network that sends data through nodes experiencing the best conditions, avoiding clouds and transmitting to another orbiter or ground station instead. All this would be happening at light speed. "Your data bounces around the world until it finds a transmitter that can see the receiver clearly," is how he puts it.

Then there are the methods Israel and Mitchell talk about that maintain or 'clean up' the signal. "You still have issues where you need to get the beam re-centered and refocused because it will be sort of gridded and the phase will be different across the wavefront," Mitchell says. "We have coding and modulation and other methods that take care of a lot [of data fidelity]. If you looked at the variation of the signal it'd look like it was moving around a lot but it can be cleaned up without us losing data pretty remarkably

The future of space-based internet

Legends about NASA's commercial successes with Tang (apocryphal), memory foam and scratch resistant sunglass lenses abound, but the LCRD was created for the sake of scientific discovery.

A precursor mission, Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), sent data to the receiver at 257 Mbits/sec for more than 4 hours (while it passed by in the sky), receiving 4.7Tbits of information. Contrast that with Magellan mission to Venus in the 1990s, which returned around 1.2Tbits over its five year mission.

That means DSOC sent nearly four times as much data almost 8,000 times faster – in a single pass. "What new discoveries could be made with such communications capability?" Mitchell asks.

Of course, industry will only be interested if it's worth the investment, and nobody's going to throw 5G towers or phone exchanges away any time soon. So how different is the machinery you need to send pet pictures to the ISS? The transmitter is a laser generator affixed to a telescope at an observatory – not fundamentally different to the LED and modulator sending the data of this website down fiber optic cabling right now.

Even more interesting is when Israel describes the device on the ISS that receives the information, something that enables "bits going in and out" and "a fibre optic connection through amplifier". In other words, a modem. Even more crucially, he says at one point "there was no change to the commercial modem". It sounds for all the world like SCaN is an everyday fibre optic internet connection without the fibre optics.

Israel doesn't think we'll all have dishes on our office roofs any time soon, a passing satellite firing a concentrated laser full of internet traffic at us. However, he can see a place for such tech. "Where it fits is in satellite systems, telecom hub buildings or gateways with the big antenna all pointed at at different satellites," he says.

Laser internet isn't common yet – but it's also not science fiction. If you're waiting for it to make your video conferencing experience better that might take awhile, but for now, it has the capability to supercharge our understanding of the universe around us.