NASA’s successful demonstration of laser communications during the Artemis II mission marked a turning point for a technology that has been in development for years, proving that optical communications can support human spaceflight operations.

“Our goal was really to show how it could be used for this type of application, show where it fits in with the traditional radio frequency services that are provided by NASA,” Nikki Desch, project manager for the Orion Artemis II Optical Communication Payload System at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said during Federal News Network’s Space & Satellite Exchange 2026.

The optical communications payload system, known as O2O, flew aboard the Orion capsule during the 10-day Artemis II mission, transmitting up to 484 gigabytes of data — including high-resolution imagery, high-definition video, scientific data and engineering data — as four astronauts traveled around the Moon. The Artemis II crew was the first to leave low Earth orbit since 1972.

Ever-evolving comm capability

The O2O system has been in development since 2017 as part of a broader NASA effort to advance the readiness of optical communications technology for space applications, ranging from low Earth orbit and geostationary orbit to lunar missions.

Unlike traditional radio frequency communications, optical communications use infrared lasers to transmit large volumes of data while using less power and taking up less onboard space. But while the technology offers significantly greater bandwidth, its signals can get impacted by clouds and other atmospheric conditions.

Those limitations, Desch said, can largely be mitigated by having geographically dispersed ground stations where the optical communications terminal in space can point to another available station if its primary ground station becomes unavailable.

Despite those challenges, Desch said the O2O system performed better than expected throughout the Artemis II mission.

“Our main expectation was to utilize it to the maximum extent possible. It really became an integral part of the planning performed by mission control throughout the Artemis II mission,” Desch said.

“We transmitted more data than we had expected. We performed handovers between the ground stations. It was available whenever it was needed throughout the mission, and it was used as a very critical complement to the traditional RF services. It performed excellently.”

Providing wealth of data in near-real time

Shortly after Orion’s lunar flyby, the optical communications system quickly transmitted thousands of images, giving astronauts near-real-time access to the mission’s most anticipated images. The experience was akin to upgrading from dialup internet service to fiber-optic broadband, Desch said.

“You use dialup your entire life, and you say, ‘I don’t need that extra bandwidth.’ But once you actually have that immediate response, it’s impossible to think about going back to dialup. Right after the lunar flyby, the O2O system was used to download the contents of the personal computing devices used by the astronauts to capture a lot of the images. They were just in awe of how many pictures they had to look through. We could make many of them available to the public, so they could actually have this in real time and not necessarily wait until after Artemis II finishes to be able to see all of these awesome images,” Desch said.

“The immediacy — it is one thing to say it and know that and understand that that’s an effect of the optical communications, but actually experiencing that is different. I think that having that experience has just changed the perspectives of a number of our stakeholders.”

More still to come for optical comm

NASA is currently developing the communications infrastructure that will support future lunar missions, and optical communications are expected to be an integral part of that architecture.

The mission also demonstrated that having optical communications readily available is “ready to happen.” Optical communications have already become commercially mature in low Earth orbit, but it is not the same for lunar missions.

“You can’t just buy a lunar optical communication terminal off the shelf just yet. But that is something that is a viable path forward in the future. Now that we’ve demonstrated the operational utility of O2O and optical communications in lunar, we hope that industry will lean into this technology and make it much more commercially available,” Desch said.

Ultimately, Artemis II helped NASA learn more about how optical communications could operate alongside the space agency’s traditional RF systems, the types of data best suited for each system, how to integrate optical communications into mission control’s operational workflows and how stakeholders viewed the technology after using it.

“That’s one of the biggest takeaways — seeing how people, how our stakeholders have reacted, how they perceived this capability. What were the big takeaways, and what did they really enjoy about being able to use that? That was one of the bigger insights,” Desch said.

“NASA’s role is to invest in technology and invest in capabilities that you know is something that industry just hasn’t been ready to do or doesn’t have a business case for. The long-term business case for me was always very clear with laser communications. It did require a significant amount of investment by NASA to really raise the technology readiness level of optical communications, and so it really excites me now that we’ve worked all of these years and it is finally at a place now where it is being widely adopted by industry and about to become much more commercially prevalent,” she added.

Desch said her team is now focused on analyzing the system’s performance data, identifying potential design improvements and exploring ways to increase data rates at lunar distances beyond the system’s current 260 megabits per second.

Artemis III, slated to launch in about a year, will demonstrate docking procedures between the Orion and lunar landers in Earth orbit. Artemis IV, scheduled for launch in 2028, will return astronauts to the Moon’s surface for the first time since 1972.

Developing the ground infrastructure

For Artemis II, NASA operated optical ground stations at the White Stance Complex in New Mexico, Table Mountain facility in Wrightwood, California, and at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. The Australian National University was included as an experimental station.

“They have different types of telescopes, but ultimately they’re all able to receive the same signal from Orion,” Desch said.

Establishing that connection is one of the system’s biggest technical challenges. At lunar distances, the laser beam is only about 6 kilometers in diameter by the time it reaches Earth, requiring ground stations and the spacecraft to precisely locate and align before data can be transmitted.

Once the data is received by the ground station, it gets processed and transmitted by terrestrial networks over to the Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center.

The Australian station successfully established communications with Orion on its first attempt just like NASA’s two primary ground stations and supported data rates of up to 260 Mbps — the maximum capability of the O2O payload.

Now, expanding ground infrastructure is one of NASA’s priorities.

“There is definitely a need to have more optical ground infrastructure, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be NASA’s ground infrastructure. It could be partners, could be other space agencies, as well as the commercial providers,” Desch said. “I’m aware of a number of companies that are exploring or have built up optical ground capabilities that support low Earth orbiting satellites.”

Discover more articles and videos now on our Space & Satellite Exchange event page.

Copyright © 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.