Operational impacts of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Laser Clearinghouse on an optical communications Earth relay

NASA is planning to launch the next generation of a space-based Earth relay satellite sometime in the middle of the next decade to join the current Space Network, consisting of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites in space and the corresponding infrastructure on Earth. While the requirements and architecture for that relay satellite are unknown at this time, NASA is investing in communications technologies that could be deployed to provide new communications services. One of those new technologies is optical communications. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) project, scheduled for launch in 2019 as a hosted payload, is a critical pathfinder towards NASA providing optical communications services on the next generation space-based relay. This paper will describe the concept of operations and the impacts of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Laser Clearinghouse on the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration. It will provide a high level overview of the link budgets and discuss the analysis done on both space to ground links and geostationary (GEO) to low Earth orbit (LEO) links. The U.S. Laser Clearinghouse is a United States Air Force Strategic Command organization that provides predictive avoidance analysis and deconfliction with U.S. and allies satellites and operations. NASA's policy is to be in compliant with the U.S. Laser Clearinghouse. Having a valid concept of operations that is compliant with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Laser Clearinghouse is critical to making optical communications a reality on future NASA science and exploration missions.