Many missions already have to pre-process data and throw some data away because they are limited in how much data they can transmit back to Earth. And there are missions and instruments (like high resolution Hyperspectral imaging) that cannot even be proposed because there is no way to get the data down to Earth with RF communication technologies.

One of the main issues that prevents Laser Communications from being used by missions is the simple fact that we do not have a laser ground terminal network to receive the laser com data, like the RF network we have been building for many decades.

The ground terminal issue is what I am currently working on... developing a blueprint for ground terminal able to operate as a terminal for any laser com mission at distances from LEO to Lunar.

Up to now the ground terminals built to support the few laser communications demonstrations we have done have all been 'one of a kind' terminals that are super specialized and able to support the wavelengths and modulation formats of one mission only. I, with my team, are trying to build- using commercial off the shelf components - a flexible ground terminal that can be built to support a wide range of lasercom missions. This way the terminal built for one mission can be quickly (Hopefully in 30minutes - but we are aiming for much less) reconfigured to support another mission.

Such a ground terminal is required if we are ever to use optical communications more widely.

The high cost of space missions is spent for the data they return- lasercom allows them to return orders of magnitude more data in the same period of time. AND will take less Size Weight and Power (SWaP) than RF communication systems.

There will be a laser com system on the next manned mission to the moon. ANY 'live' High definition 4kvideo you see from that mission will have been sent to earth using laser communications.