Yes, it may matter which capability exists. If the capability exists from space, it means that they can easily switch between targets across a large swath of areas, as compared to deploying a drone near you. Have you seen laser acoustics deployed from a drone or similar platform before? It seems like getting a sufficiently stable mount on a drone would be a blocker here, although I'm not familiar with the state of that technology.

My company is developing sensors that implement these sorts of coherent interferometric ranging techniques, and I can say that it's pretty unlikely that it works from space or from a drone. There are a lot of non-obvious factors that make performing those kind of measurements from orbit a bit of a nightmare.

As far as I understand space comms--which isn't that far--the 'pilot beam' technique used by satellite links is more or less a way to get a phase lock on the signal beam, which will accurately determine the exact target location, at which point the space transmitter can use a beam-forming antenna to to jack up the power to that locale specifically, giving better SNR/bandwidth/whatever. The key bit here is that (a) the method requires that the target--i.e. your bedroom window--transmits the pilot beam up, and (b) only 'solves' the atmospheric interference issue by pointing a powerful beam accurately.

Don't get me wrong, it could probably be done with enough money, and if anybody could do it would would be the US intelligence machine. Same goes for a drone, to a lesser extent. With anything flying in the atmosphere you'll have to do deal with local vibrations on the same order as the measurement deltas you care about, but there are ways to do that too. It's interesting, thinking about it now, that a lot of what we're developing could actually be directly applied to such an endeavor, even though we're not related to such industries at all. Fun.

Yep, that's what I figured. Thanks for the input from someone with some real knowledge on the subjects.