Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds.

I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km).

Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).

Really cool project though!

But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.

"low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.