See, there's a way to motivate another space race: Get a bunch of nanosats up there broadcasting material that's offensive to as many governments as possible.

I think that would eventually motivate people to clean up space junk, once China, India, US and Russia blow up a few pirate satellites and everyone realizes we can't get to orbit for awhile.

Periodically shotgun a bunch of RPIs (or their sensible equivalent) on just big enough satellites. The "servers" are distributed across the little nodes. Assume they'll fail and burn up, or just burn up, and keep on shotgunning them up there as long as subscriber fees are profitable enough.

Maybe they don't even need to be profitable if they also serve some sort of propaganda/free speech function for regions of the world that the developed West wants to poke at.

Edit: or shoot big satellites up there, containing the little satellite/server swarms. Spit some more out when necessary.

Yes - the automated X-37 can get to it no problem.

Anybody with a dish and a key can reach it, right?

Probably. Then again anyone with a transmitting dish can be triangulated by the government body that doesn't like people doing that.

But satellite TV is used in tons of places, with most systems of the past decade also being able to transmit.

People having a satellite dish pointed at a satellite there would be in the range of hundreds of millions alone in europe.

Your TV dish is not transmitting.

But the point is, that if some country decides the new internet via satellite to be illegal, it is _very_ easy for them to find people using it.

Not true. Could be in of a van. Or hidden on a roof. Iraq had once forbidden TV satellite dishes; thousands were in use.

A dish leaks very little energy except in the direction of the satellite. It could be astronomically unlikely anyone could detect its use unless they were line-of-sight between the dish and the satellite. And pointed in the right direction.

And the reason they could hide those TV dishes under roofs is that they are not transmitting.

If you want internet via satellite, they are transmitting, and while they are directional towards the satellite, there's enough signal going off in other direction sides making it not that hard to detect from the ground.

The dish actually supports transmitting, in case we’d want to use it for satellite internet, but we haven’t used it for that, yet.

I meant that in the same sense as my parent comment; "reach" as in "take down" or "tamper with".