“I'm led through a series of concrete corridors at Vilnius Tech University, Lithuania; the murals give a Soviet-era vibe, and it seems an unlikely location for a high-tech lab working on a laser communication system.”
This is how BBC technology journalist MaryLou Costa introduced the headquarters of Astrolight, a six-year-old Lithuanian space-tech start-up that raised €2.8m in May to build what it calls an “optical data highway”.
Costa explains, “You could think of the tech as invisible internet cables, designed to link satellites with Earth.”
With 70,000 satellites expected to be launched into orbit over the next five years, the market potential is significant. The company aims to help shift the sector from traditional radio-frequency communications to faster, more secure, higher-capacity laser technology.
The article highlights that Astrolight’s space laser technology could also be used for defence purposes – a relevant point given Russia’s increasingly aggressive stance toward neighbouring countries.
“So we said, ‘All right – we know how to do it for space. It looks like we can do it for terrestrial applications too,’” said Laurynas Mačiulis, one of Astrolight’s founders and CEO, speaking about the early development of the technology.
He explained that the technology is particularly attractive to the military because the laser system is difficult to intercept or jam, with a very low probability of detection.
“If you turn on your radio transmitter in Ukraine, you're immediately becoming a target, because it's easy to track. So with this technology, because the information travels in a very narrow laser beam, it's very difficult to detect,” he added.
Just this week, according to Lithuanian business news outlet Verslo žinios, Astrolight successfully tested its Polaris laser communication terminal in collaboration with Lithuania’s Naval Forces. The trial demonstrated a secure, undetectable, and unbreachable high-speed optical connection between two naval vessels in the Baltic Sea, a region that now frequently experiences radio interference and GPS jamming.
You can find the whole BBC story here.
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