Space service company Contec has announced the establishment of its second optical ground station for downstreaming satellite data by laser in South Korea.

The new ground station is located at the Asian Space Park in Sangdae-Ri on the island of Jeju, south of the country, and was deployed with the assistance of French group Cailabs, which specializes in laser communications.

“By working with Cailabs, we are strengthening our technological capabilities and positioning ourselves to meet the increasing demand for faster and more reliable satellite communications,” said Dr. Seong-hee Lee, CEO of Contec, in a statement.

In November, Seong-hee expressed an ambition to complete two optical ground stations in 2026, leveraging Daejeon-based Contec's extensive Ground Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) network, as well as establish leadership in the burgeoning satellite quantum key distribution (QKD) market.

The new ground station site uses Renne-based Cailabs’ proprietary “atmospheric turbulence mitigation” technology to support this kind of downlink. The company installed a TILBA-OGS L10 at Sangdae-Ri, which claims to improve space optical links down to land, air, and sea with the use of multi-plane light conversion (MPLC).

Optical satellite transmission has occasionally been touted as a breakthrough technology that solves certain glaring bottlenecks in space industries, though it possesses a long history in the sector. It is deployed to great effect for the use of intersatellite links, moving massive sums of data across constellations and orbital planes at the speed of light, though the holy grail has always been space-to-ground connectivity.

In a recent Gartner report entitled Orbital Datacenters Won’t Serve Terrestrial Needs, so Focus on Earth, VP analyst Bill Ray lamented that data could not be reliably downstreamed from orbit via laser because of Earth’s tendency to possess cloud cover, through which beams of light are usually completely blocked.

Cailabs’ technology decomposes the collected downstream beam into a limited number of spatial modes using its MPLC spatial demultiplexer, then recombines them on an integrated photonic chip into a single-mode fiber. It's similar to adaptive optics, but serves as a mechanically passive component. All this improves performance in the face of turbulence, but not clouds, well known for their outstanding capability to block light.

Cailabs has offices in the US, but is headquartered in Rennes, France, where it launched the construction of a new 10,000 sqm industrial site for scaling up production of optical ground station components, an irreplaceable piece of the orbital compute supply chain that experts have disputed the viability of. The site will increase company production capacity to install 50 optical ground stations per year by 2028, creating more than 100 jobs, expanding to 300 when it reaches full-scale.