NASA may use lasers to livestream from the Moon one day

Getting a live play-by-play of astronauts in space during future Artemis Moon missions could eventually be possible thanks to laser technology. NASA is testing a space communication method that, instead of using radio waves, uses a laser beam to connect Earth with astronauts on the Moon.

- Meredith Garofalo

The bar has been set for a while, with NASA teams making huge strides in laser communications since an experiment performed in December of 2023. The next round of experiments began in early June and featured connecting NASA's Pilatus PC-12 plane back to instruments at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland via laser link. Heading into July, the team historically sent a 4K video on a round-trip journey to the International Space Station (ISS) from an aircraft. And 30 July witnessed the completion of another experiment in the series as the aircraft did another test run of the so-called Highrate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) system. "We've demonstrated a secure file transfer from the ISS, which is the first time that's been demonstrated ever. We demonstrated over 900 megabits per second over the laser communications link from the ISS, which is also the first time that's ever been demonstrated in space," Rachel Dudukovich, lead engineer for HDTN at NASA's Glenn, said.