NASA’s Artemis II Moon mission shows space-to-Earth laser comms can scale

Earlier this month, NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts to orbit the Moon and used new laser communications systems to beam dramatic images back to Earth.

One of the receivers, though, wasn’t hosted by the US space agency. A low-cost terminal built by the companies Observable Space and Quantum Opus, and operated by the Australian National University, pulled down data broadcast from a spacecraft at the Moon at a rate of 260 megabits per second.

That success proves that high-throughput connections between Earth and space can be done on the cheap, the companies say.

The terminal used Observable Space’s software and telescope to capture and lock onto the transmissions from the Orion spacecraft, and a photonic sensor built by Quantum Opus to decode the data. Their terminal cost less than $5 million, compared to more bespoke solutions that cost tens of millions of dollars.

NASA has been testing deep space laser communications for several years, including a demonstration of data links with a spacecraft 218 million miles from Earth on its way to an asteroid. Artemis II was its most comprehensive demonstration yet: NASA’s official demonstration receivers in California and New Mexico, as well as the low-cost experimental terminal in Australia, all collected 4k video from the trip around the Moon.

Though laser communications boast much higher throughput than radio frequency transmissions that remain the primary communications option for space, lasers are more vulnerable to disruptions from cloudy weather, and they must be within line of site of their target—hence the importance of having a reception site on the other side of the world from the US.

Josh Cassada, a former US astronaut who cofounded Quantum Opus, pointed out that Australia was the first continent to appear in the first Earthrise photo captured by the Artemis II astronauts.

Observable Space CEO Dan Roelker said the mission proves that space-to-Earth laser downlinks are ready to scale. Already in wide use for satellite-to-satellite connections, the technology hasn’t previously been used to transmit back to Earth because of the cost, but now he envisions a global network of these terminals to receive data sent from satellites of all kinds.

“We can scale this over the next year or more,” Roelker told TechCrunch, though how that happens—and who funds it—is yet to be determined.

“We will partner with a lot of people around this,” he said, “whether this is something we’re going to do ourselves, or partner with other ground station-as-a-service companies, or work with extremely large constellation providers that are going to want to own their own infrastructure.”