  CubeSats are excellent platforms to rapidly perform simple space experiments.
Several hundreds of CubeSats have already been successfully launched in the
past few years and the number of announced launches grows every year. These
platforms provide an easy access to space for universities and organizations
which otherwise could not afford it. However, these spacecraft still rely on RF
communications, where the spectrum is already crowded and cannot support the
growing demand for data transmission to the ground. Lasercom holds the promise
to be the solution to this problem, with a potential improvement of several
orders of magnitude in the transmission capacity, while keeping a low size,
weight and power. Between 2016 and 2017, The Keck Institute for Space Studies
(KISS), a joint institute of the California Institute of Technology and the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, brought together a group of space scientists and
lasercom engineers to address the current challenges that this technology
faces, in order to enable it to compete with RF and eventually replace it when
high-data rate is needed. After two one-week workshops, the working group
started developing a report addressing three study cases: low Earth orbit,
crosslinks and deep space. This paper presents the main points and conclusions
of these KISS workshops.
