Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC)

One of the first things people thought when they detected pulsars is that they were attempts by aliens to communicate across lightyears.

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200602/history.cfm

How much bandwidth are we talking about? 1 Mbps? 10 Mbps? I read most of the fact sheet but it doesn’t seem to provide an answer other than “10x state of the art radio”.

Anyway, this is very cool. And it’s an important change if we live in the dark forest solution of the Fermi paradox. :)

Is there anything new about this? Psyche's flying around, but hasn't had much data to return. There was a proposed Mars Telecommunications Orbiter way back when which had a laser data link, but it was cancelled as they were able to up the data rates of existing satellites and/or use other science satellites to push bits when they were otherwise idle. The DSN could use a single antenna to listen to multiple spacecraft in the same spot if they're on different frequencies, so it was also like free capacity (free dish...still need really expensive, really sensitive demuxers behind them)

After trying to pack my status and health report uplink from my application into a quarter of a bit per second, I'm pretty excited about improving the bandwidth from space systems.