Abstract: Bidirectional, high data rate, low size, weight, and power (SWaP), and low cost free space optical links are needed for space communication applications to send and receive large volumes of data. We are exploring design strategies for optical transceivers to reduce SWaP and cost through increased misalignment tolerance (pointing requirement reduction) and sharing the optical transmit and receive paths (imposing optical symmetry). In applications where the detector is fiber coupled, the fiber …