That's cool, thanks. Basically, the ISS laser experiment was not stretching the bounds of the method at all. Put a proper telescope at the receiving end, and i

That's cool, thanks. Basically, the ISS laser experiment was not stretching the bounds of the method at all. Put a proper telescope at the receiving end, and it changes the game completely. It's simply amazing how little light modern telescopes are capable of detecting and measuring. Note that your arxiv paper describes detecting a 50kW laser that is diffraction limited for a 10m aperture. That in itself would be a quite interesting piece of equipment to build. Edit: Interesting - the abstract seems to have been mis-copy&pasted, with 60kW instead of 50kW.