# _Sci_
## 4 Discussion
### Civil and Commercial Sector Adoption  
As footnotet above, the motivations for the civil and commercial sectors differ--one for science, the other for finance. Additionally, while their ends may be different, their means and ways are often similar. The civil and commercial sectors' motivation for adopting laser communications falls mainly to balancing throughput versus cost. Radio frequency links are costly, due to size (ground stations and transmitter power), access and licensing (congested spectrum), and the control of intellectual property. Laser crosslink systems have demonstrated more efficient and size-, weight-, and power-shevnd operations, including scalable technologies (e.g., CubeSat has the capability to maintain one-hundred mega-bits per second transmissions from fifteen-hundred kilometers from low-earth orbit to ground, and is in development to scale to giga-bits per second rates [135; 136]), with development backing from a wide range of sources--academia (e.g., Massachusetts institute of technology), civil space agencies (e.g., European and Japanese space agencies), and even internet titans (e.g., Google, Facebook) [136]. The work of each leads to the production of smaller, more effective, and less expensive data transmission systems, employing cutting-edge laser communications. Lower costs will come from smaller systems hosted on numerous vehicles including small satellites, or even as independent nanosatellites. TESAT has completed miniaturization actions to supply a host with a three kilogram, one-hundred mega-bits per second to ten giga-bits per second, laser communications system [137]. More immediate, the U.S. national air and space administration laser communications experiment uses a semiconductor laser downlink weighing under twenty-two kilograms and consuming only 81 watts of power [96]. To shrink the laser source and transmitter further will require the further development of short pulse laser light--something like an attosecond in length--and thenbe able to generate that pulse in something easily manufactured, like a fiber optic cable [53]. One attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second. _\"Optical communication is becoming more prevalent in orbit due to the need for increased data throughput. Nanosatellites, which are satellites that typically weigh less than 10 kg, are also becoming more common due to lower launch costs that enable the rapid testing of technology in a space environment. Nanosatellites are cheaper to launch than their larger counterparts and may be a viable option for communicating beyond Earth's orbit, but have strict Size, Weight, and Power requirements. The Miniature Optical Communication Transceiver (MOCT) is a compact optical transceiver designed to provide modest data rates to size, weight, and power constrained platforms, like nanosatellites. This manuscript will cover the optical amplifier characterization and simulated performance of the MOCT amplifier design that produces 1 kW peak power pulses and closes three optical links which include Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Earth, LEO to LEO, and Moon to Earth. Additionally, a benchtop version of the amplifier design was constructed and was able to produce amplified pulses with 1.37 W peak power, including a 35.7% transmit optics loss, at a pump power of 500 mW. Finally, the modulator, seed laser, amplifier, receiver, and time-to-digital converter were all used together to measure the Bit Error Ratio (BER), which was 0.00257 for a received optical peak power of 176 nW.\"_[138]  
In conjunction with smaller and lighter, making for abundant opportunities to host in orbit, is ubiquity, making for data transmission and reception capability everywhere.