China Achieves Two-Way Laser Communication With a Satellite in Lunar Orbit

A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved a two-way laser communication link across cislunar space on August 26, 2026, downloading data from an experimental satellite in lunar orbit at 100 megabits per second and sending commands back up at 1.25 megabits per second. The test, led by the Academy's Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilisation (CSU), makes China only the second country to verify two-way high-speed laser communication over such a distance, more than a decade after NASA first demonstrated it in 2013.

The test linked an Earth-based optical telescope in Yunnan province with DRO-A, an experimental satellite in a distant retrograde orbit more than 400,000 kilometres away — about 30 times farther than geostationary orbit. The in-orbit verification ran for more than 12 months. Yang Lei, head of the CSU laser test team, told state broadcaster CGTN that "Earth-Moon communication is like threading a needle from a thousand miles away," since even a microscopic wobble in the spacecraft or a shimmer in Earth's atmosphere can knock a laser beam miles off target.

Laser communication replaces radio with focused beams of infrared light, which oscillate far faster than radio waves and can carry much more data, while needing smaller, lighter receivers than radio dish antennas. At the 100-megabit-per-second downlink speed, an 8K image of the lunar surface that takes four to five minutes over a conventional 5-megabit-per-second microwave link can be sent in about 12 seconds.

DRO-A and its twin, DRO-B, launched in 2024 as part of the Academy's "Earth-Moon Space DRO Exploration Research" programme, but an upper-stage anomaly left them in the wrong trajectory; engineers spent months performing orbital manoeuvres to reach a usable distant retrograde orbit. Once there, DRO-A and DRO-B linked with a near-Earth satellite, DRO-L, to form a three-satellite constellation for cislunar communication testing. The link is meant to support China's planned crewed Moon landings and International Lunar Research Station in the 2030s.