Andrew Benincasa

Sergi Aliaga, Vitaly Petrov, Andrew Benincasa et al.

The landscape of sub-terahertz (sub-THz, 100GHz - 300GHz) wireless technology evolved drastically over the last two decades - from only a few niche use cases in sensing and ultra-short-range communications in early 2000s toward operational multi-kilometer range 100GBbit/s+ wireless backhaul links demonstrated recently. Building on this momentum, this article explores the feasibility of extending sub-THz communications to 100-km-scale satellite links. We first assess the technological readiness of emerging sub-THz hardware and signal-processing techniques, highlighting their potential to support long-range operation in low-Earth-orbit (LEO) systems. We then outline the unique role that sub-THz links can play as a complementary solution to existing millimeter-wave and optical (``laser'') satellite technologies, offering additional capacity, improved resilience, and new architectural flexibility. We further discuss open research and engineering challenges toward implementing such sub-THz satellite communication systems in practice. We finally outline the key state-of-the-art solutions and the roadmap of TeraLink, an ongoing international R&D project aiming to build and launch, through an approved NASA CSLI space mission, the first hardware prototype of sub-THz LEO satellite communications in space.

Eduardo Baena, Paolo Testolina, Michele Polese et al.

Lunar surface operations impose stringent requirements on wireless communication systems, including autonomy, robustness to disruption, and the ability to adapt to environmental and mission-driven context. While Space-O-RAN provides a distributed orchestration model aligned with 3GPP standards, its decision logic is limited to static policies and lacks semantic integration. We propose a novel extension incorporating a semantic agentic layer enabled by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocols, allowing context-aware decision making across real-time, near-real-time, and non-real-time control layers. Distributed cognitive agents deployed in rovers, landers, and lunar base stations implement wireless-aware coordination strategies, including delay-adaptive reasoning and bandwidth-aware semantic compression, while interacting with multiple MCP servers to reason over telemetry, locomotion planning, and mission constraints.