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Japanese telco SoftBank has joined a consortium that will develop and test several spaced-based optical wireless applications.
The group, led by Japan's ICT research agency – the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) – plans to launch a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite next year that will serve as a test-bed that can showcase optical comms between space and the ground.
That will be followed up in 2027 with what NICT describes as a "world-pioneering" initiative to install optical wireless devices on a high altitude platform station (HAPS) in order to verify bidirectional communication over a distance of 2 km between space and the stratosphere.
