Others have mentioned the advantage in terms of burst errors. That is fairly common for radio signals coming from space. Think of an airplane flying through the

Others have mentioned the advantage in terms of burst errors. That is fairly common for radio signals coming from space. Think of an airplane flying through the signal path or something. I know in the NRO all of the radio downlink used BCH for error correction that could correct up to 4 bits per byte, and DPCM for compression, which also does particularly well with long runs of the same pixel value, something pretty common with space imagery (most of what you're looking at is black). BCH allows you to pick exactly how many bits per byte you want to be able to correct, which can be tuned based on known error characteristics of your signal. Part of it may just be these systems have been around a long time and we already have extremely well-tuned and efficient implementations that are known to work quite well with very large volumes of data inbound from space.