[Server-sky] O3b mentioned here, laser links emerging - even from lunar orbit

[Michael Turner]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518826/nasa-moonshot-will-test-laser-communications/

Last I checked, there were pretty strong ITAR restrictions on
communicating using narrow beams from orbit. I suspect this has
changed -- for one thing, Planetary Resources has never mentioned this
constraint in talking about the Arkyd comm system, which is optical

I'm no satellite communications engineer, so I don't know what the
implications of greater laser bandwidth in orbit would be, for Server
Sky. Is it possible that the design of thinsats is somewhat eased if
they only need to route computational results through near neighbors,
and eventually to a laser downlink?

Regards,
Michael Turner

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