New Space becomes more attractive for many space industries due to its huge potential for commercialization opportunities that involve private companies and driven by new technologies including Earth observation, satellite communication and space services. Due to fast growth of spacecrafts and number of constellations, the data to be stored onboard and latency to get it to the final user are becoming challenging because of radio frequency (RF) communication system limitations. Optical communication technologies offer significantly higher data rate compared to RF communication systems and optical beams are less susceptible to interferences from other RF signals in congested space environments. In addition, optical systems offer low size, Low Weight and Power consumption (SWaP) that makes them suitable for small satellites and rapid deployment in LEO orbits. However optical technologies come with their own challenges, one such being atmospheric turbulence effects between space to ground stations. We are developing an optical payload with the new space requirements in terms of SWaP and space environment qualification. In addition to space applications, the payload can be used as an optical transceiver to enable ground to ground optical communication. To address this, we work on the miniaturization of the optics including telescope, PCB boards, space qualified opto-mechanical designs. The payload can operate with data rates up to 1 Gbps and over a link distance of up to 1000 km with an additional objective to reach 1 Tbps in ground-to-ground line of sight applications. It uses the Intensity-Modulation-Direct-Detection (IM-DD) offering flexibilities of transmitter and receiver designs. We also explore the possibility to increase the data rate by using advanced modulation techniques including Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and Optical Angular Momentum (OAM). A promising technique in spatial multiplexing is OAM as it presents, in theory, an infinite degree of freedom basis, allowing for the use of extensive symbol sets in optical communication systems. Regarding the propagation channel, we are carrying out local weather monitoring and analysis to gather the gradient of the weather conditions (wind speed, temperature, relative humidity). The measured data contributes to the building of a UAE local weather database and to predict the optical communication link performance. As a result, the atmospheric conditions data gives relevant information about the possible communication windows with the optimum Fried parameter and Cn2 parameters. The use of neutral networks for turbulence mitigation is one of the solutions we investigate to correct for the residual turbulence effect on the optical link, along with an adaptive optics solution. In this work we introduce the use of Brownian-Bridge and CycleGAN Neural Network architectures to mitigate atmospheric turbulence-induced distortion. We will present the optical link budget design of space to ground optical communications links. The radiometry of the transmitter and the receiver, along with propagation channel loss will be discussed. Different link scenarios for ground application (few kilometers) and LEO orbit applications (400-600 km) are analyzed where we calculate the link margin from the received power and the receiver sensitivity. To make the model closer to the UAE near-ground weather conditions, we use real data measured in Masdar city during December 2023 where we calculated the Cn2 at different times of the day.