  Owing to the extremely narrow beams, a main issue in optical deep space
communications is represented by miss-pointing errors, which may severely
degrade the system performance and availability. In this paper, we address
pointing losses in the case in which both the receiver and the transmitter are
affected by angular errors. Pointing losses are evaluated through two
approaches. The first approach is deterministic and only requires knowledge of
a maximum angular error. The second approach requires knowledge of the angular
error statistical distribution and tackles the problem from an outage
probability viewpoint. These tools are then applied to analyze the impact of
pointing losses in deep space optical links in which both terminals suffer from
miss-pointing effects. The antenna gains are first optimized to maximize the
effective system gain. The optimum antenna gains are then applied to evaluate
maximum achievable ranges and to perform link design by means of optical link
budgets.
