[jonah-archive]

Free-space optical transmission is a thing, though it's environmentally quite challenging. We tested some gear from https://www.koruza.net at the Internet Archive ~10 years ago or so (I've also built some 10G point-to-point links in my garage, though I'd hardly call them reliable). It is pretty cool to see a scratch build rather than using commercial transceivers

[esseph]

Taara is a Google/X moonshot that was recently spun off to do the same thing.

https://www.taaraconnect.com/product

[tgma]

Doesn't Starlink do that already for sat2sat comms?

[eqvinox]

Not quite the same thing as doing it in an atmosphere.