NASA Beams Video from Space Station via Laser

Whilst laser-based space communications promise much higher bandwidth, clouds and airborne aerosols are both opaque and highly reflective over much of the IR spectrum. Ground stations would be best located on high mountain peaks to take advantage of atmospheric IR windows (gray areas).

Still, clouds remain a problem, becoming only reasonably 'transparent' at submillimeter wavelengths (THz).

With deep-space communications every femtowatt counts, and so it might be best to orbit the Earthside (laser) repeaters and communicate with them via microwave ground stations.

LASER has very narrow, tightly coherent, beam pattern, making 'point-to-point' communication possible.

RF has rather wide, divergent, beam pattern, making only 'area-to-area' communication possible.

The divergence of both is a function of wavelength and aperture. So what's your point?

Privacy...or as NSA would say..."listening/eavesdropping" ability.

The fox is guarding the henhouse? Surely not!

Seems like it would be better to put some satellites in geostationary orbit, with IR laser tranceiver links to the Moon, but with standard microwave tranceivers for the downlink to Earth.