NASA’s Artemis II Moon mission demonstrates the potential for extending laser communications from space to Earth

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

However, one of the receivers was not hosted by the US space agency. A low-cost station built by Observable Space and Quantum Opus, and operated by the Australian National University, pulled data beamed from a spacecraft to the moon at a rate of 260 megabits per second.

The companies say this success proves that high-throughput communications between Earth and space can be done inexpensively.

The station used Observable Space software and its telescope to capture and lock transmissions from the Orion spacecraft, as well as an optical sensor designed by Quantum Opus to decode the data. Their station cost less than $5 million, compared to custom solutions that cost tens of millions of dollars.

NASA has been testing laser communications in deep space 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 the most comprehensive demonstration yet: NASA’s primary receivers in California and New Mexico, as well as the low-cost experimental station in Australia, collected 4K video from the trip around the moon.

Although laser communications have much higher throughput than radio frequency transmissions and remain the primary communications option for space, lasers are more susceptible to disturbances from cloudy weather, and must be within line of location of their target – hence the importance of having a receiving site on the other side of the world from the United States.

Josh Cassada, a former American astronaut who co-founded Quantum Opus, noted that Australia was the first continent to appear in the first image of an Earthrise taken by the Artemis 2 astronauts.

Observable Space CEO Dan Ruelker said the mission proves that space-to-Earth laser downlinks are ready for expansion. This technology is already widely used for satellite-to-satellite communications, and had not previously been used for transmission to Earth due to cost, but he now envisions a global network of such terminals to receive data sent from satellites of all types.

“We could scale this up over the next year or more,” Rolker told TechCrunch, though how that will happen — and who will fund it — has yet to be determined.

“We’re going to partner with a lot of people on this, whether it’s something we’ll do ourselves, partner with other companies that offer ground stations as a service, or work with very large constellation providers that will want to own their own infrastructure,” he said.