Satellites are super expensive. It's why I am building a high altitude balloon platform as an alternative that is much cheaper.

Our objective is to have a finished prototype by end of this year. We are putting the final touches on our (completely self hosted) IT/Business/R&D systems (full disclosure we don't self host our primary e-mail or voip but hope todo so by year end).

I believe that the bitcoin satellite is an "out of band" node on the blockchain? I don't believe it provides any services except being a blockchain node.

My overall concern is that the blockchain can be crippled by the powers that be deciding that the bitcoin protocol/port (or anything encrypted they don't have the keys to) will be blocked. Unless everyone that wants to use blockchain has satellite transceiver technology (hard to do in an apartment) (and if they are blocking bitcoin, it's exactly the time everyone should be using bitcoin) .

With our system and network (which will be owned by a cooperative) (we are figuring out how todo multi state/international cooperative from a legal perspective) it will be heavily de-centralized/distributed. Owned/operated/controlled and physically co-located with it's subscribers.

The balloons (MorseFlyer) will be sold to a single entity (the cooperative) and also the ground stations/signal distribution (MorseTown). The subscribers will have a MorsePOD which will have a unique alphanumeric identifier (an identity that you can own and can't be taken away (like a sibling comment talking about DNS being used for censorship and I'll reply directly to that with more detail) .

The overall operating theory being "you can't kick in a million doors" . Of course, in theory, that is possible. And is exactly the time that a system like this will be needed.

Using (networking) layer 2 technology, direct connection is possible. So if the balloons get shut down, the middleware gets taken out, the MorsePODs can (via many many many hops potentially) all talk to each other.

I am in the process of writing all this up in detail from my private notes.

tl;dr , I don't believe an off planet blockchain node will help.

It would be great if this allowed bi-directional bitcoin traffic. If I understand correctly, you can use it to download the blockchain and keep it synced, but not to broadcast your node data (inbound connections) or broadcast transactions.