A New Optical Communication Architecture for Delivering Extremely Large Volumes of Data from Space to Ground

Space-based laser communication has been demonstrated at rates ranging from 10’s of Mbps to a few Gbps for near-Earth crosslinks and for direct-to-Earth downlinks from ranges as far as the Moon. We describe a novel space-to-Earth communication architecture that can deliver many terabytes of data regularly, if the user is willing to accept certain amounts of delay. With careful design of space and ground terminals, and by tapping the recent advances in integrated extremely high rate modems developed by the fiber telecommunications industry, we believe that space terminal cost, ground terminal cost, and operations costs can be kept much lower than present day radio-frequency or proposed optical systems while increasing the amount of data delivery by orders of magnitude.