Sunlight is about 1000 watts/meter^2 on the ground. Do you have any idea how much power you'd have to send to get through a Jewish Space Laser(tm) to even have a -40 db s/(s+n) signal to pull out of the noise through a side-channel attack?

It would be interesting to use a solar panel as a sensor for moonbounce of an IR laser, though. You'd have to try at the almost new moon, with a window of a few hours/month ;-)