This week a company by the name of Oerklikon announced they'd simulated a 1.5 million mile laser broadband link, which should provide NASA and others with a much wider pipe to transmit mission data. Former Boeing engineer and DSLReports.com user Mike Nolan writes in to tell me he's not sold on the Oerklikon findings, while providing an interesting primer on the state of broadband...in space! (cue music).

"Lasercomm is definitely going to replace RF for a lot of applications, fairly soon," admits Mike. "But the numbers that company is advertising about what is available today are off, and the test is kinda meaningless," he says. Nolan provides us with a a link to the Boeing site primer on the TDRS spacecraft, which is outfitted with gear capable of data rates that aren't exactly shabby.

How does he know the website is accurate? "I built the antennas," he says.

His primary point is that existing communications isn't quite as archaic as we're being led to believe. The relevant part from the Boeing website Mike wanted us to take a look at was this:Three of these are up there operating in GEO (23,000 miles up), Nolan says. "They are used as relays between the shuttle/space station and the ground station in White Sands, New Mexico -- Shuttle/station use LEO orbits (180 to 300 miles up), so using GEO relays is the only way to communicate continuously with the ground."

Nolan says that the problem with laser communication is that simply communicating is easy -- the hard part is getting them correctly aimed at one another over extremely long distances. Reducing the aperture (which is what Oerklikon did to simulate communications over 1.5 million miles) doesn't really demonstrate anything of worth, he says.

"I was Boeing's spacecraft designer for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter proposal, which used all sorts of technologies that aren't even invented yet," chides Nolan. "But we chose to stick with an RF communications antenna, because we're probably decades away from being able to point lasers accurately enough to make them useful over interplanetary distances."