Allen Thomson,
You and your interesting topic must be on the same taboo/nondisclosure
banishment list as myself. You seem to be thinking either a little too
far outside of their mainstream status quo box or, into topics of
whatever's 'nondisclosure', such as I've discovered whenever I've
suggested utilizing our existing 0.5 milliradian ABL of 100 MW class
laser cannon (somewhat modified from IR to perhaps 450 nm) for
interplanetary communications. If nothing else, it seems our growing
fleet of ABLs should be capable of starting our first 'War of the
Worlds' faster than our resident warlord(GW Bush) can point out another
oily rock hiding that first WMD, or perhaps even Osama bin Laden.

I've even suggested having those relatively small and energy efficient
radar image receiving apertures situated upon the moon, in as mush as
such would have been providing 10 mm/pixel and possibly even as good as
16 bits/pixel look-see at the likes of Venus and Mars, 100 mm/pixel and
8 bits/pixel of the likes of Saturn and of that nifty Titan moon, not
to mention absolutely terrific NEO spotting and tracking capability.

It seems that my LSE-CM/ISS and of it's dipole element deployment of a
dozen or so 100 GW laser cannons to within 50,000 km of mother Earth
isn't what their doctor ordered either.

Thus for the likes of radar or better yet being of a near-UV or even IR
spectrum data throughput as focused to a relatively small spot or
target zone is absolutely terrific, especially if that were of the
near-UV or into the UV/a spectrum, as per say that's not going to fry
your butt, just slicing through a few strands of your DNA, of which a
good dosage of steroids or banked bone marrow should eliminate most of
the negative affects. Actually, if it's not too terribly clouded, a
fairly small amount of laser energy is necessary as long as the GPS
tracking is good and if need be you could keep yourself out of the
satellite sights until the download is finished, of which that process
shouldn't exceed but a millisecond if that beam were utilizing a
quantum/FM binary packet bullet mode of data transfer.

How many GBPS are they thinking of?

Basic township that's situated upon Venus:
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-town.htm
Basic LSE (Lunar Space Elevator)
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/lunar-space-elevator.htm
Other available topics by; Brad Guth / GASA-IEIS
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-topics.htm