No, you use satellites for communication, not for wallet storage. Your PC/phone currently send and receive block transactions only from the Internet where nodes continually agree by consensus on the blocklist state. A satellite communication channel would  be the new way to communicate with nodes that does NOT route through the Internet.  The satellite itself could indeed be a node, but it would also work as a mere communication channel between Earth based nodes. Making the satellite a node would require more work, since indeed it basically needs to be a PC powerful enough to hash-check transactions and such. Not sure if the significant added complexity and wattage of that would offset the communication savings.

Yes, small sats like these have lifetimes measured in years, maybe not even 10 years. That's why you launch hundreds (or thousands?) at once, and then periodically to keep them "in stock".

Every coin uses the Internet for coordination of its blockchain. It's ubiquitous, it's convenient.   But depending on this does has a major flaw for a currency. Your Internet may be limited due to location.. hard to get a hookup in the Congo even by phone dialup. Or maybe you just have a solar powered vending machine on a mountain trail far from a cell tower.  More importantly your Internet may be limited or blocked due to government control.. have you seen many blog posts from North Korean citizens? And perhaps most importantly your Internet (and therefore currency transactions) are monitored by governments (and not just yours), no matter how high your tech savvy level is.

So it's useful to have an alternative way to optionally, additionally, access a blockchain, making the currency usable without using the Internet. This second method doesn't have to be commonly used, it just has to be POSSIBLE.. we just need a "backup channel" to the blockchain for needed robustness. You need it to coordinate blocks and transactions globally and with low latency (though not much bandwidth), and be completely independent of the Internet.   What kind of communication system can do that?  There's really only one answer: Communication satellite constellations. Because it's so low bandwidth, you can use tiny cheap satellites. Guess what Vectorspacesys does?

The Nexus Earth site doesn't really explain the importance and appeal of this, but that's likely because they (quite properly) shouldn't hype a future feature that's planned but doesn't actually exist yet.

Assuming Nexus POS works the same way as proposed Bitcoin POS, there would be a POS mining channel with its own mining algorithm and reward.  The Nexus blockchain lists the hash and prime channels, but not the hidden POS mining channel. And there are no public POS miners available. So who is mining the POS blocks and what is their reward?

Maybe the POS miner is built into the wallet? That would explain why the wallet uses so much CPU constantly. Do open wallets sometimes get random POS mining rewards?

Oh!  That explains a lot of my confusion. The proof-of-stake implementation details are especially vague. How are those mined?  (Who does the (obviously simple) computation for it and gets rewarded?)  Why is P-O-S  a 10 second block instead of for example folding it as an extra parallel step into hash and prime mining?    The P-O-S blocks, because of their 10-15 second duration, really dominate the Nexus blockchain storage size and bandwidth.

Thanks! That makes a lot of things clearer.
Is this adjustment actually happening properly? If so, what's up with all the 10-20 second blocks? Shouldn't the difficulty automatically be ramped up to stop them?

Go to the block explorer and click through a bunch of blocks, looking at the "nonce".  You'll see lots of giant nonces like 376,227,383,918  but then you'll also see nonces of magnitude like 11,  or 201, or 119.   Those nonces are proof of hash mines that were so easy that they were solved with something like 20 to 100 hash attempts by a single miner. You can see this is true by looking at the hash value and seeing that sometimes only 3 to 5 leading zeros were needed.. Is that by design? Is hash mining difficulty supposed to be so simple?

Is it possible each block that gets mined by the hash algorithm sends the unused prime reward to the Nexus authors, and each block that gets PRIME mined sends the unused hash reward to the them instead.  This keeps the hash and prime rewards in sync, but still rewards the miners and the Nexus guys.

A unique part about Nexus is the TWO types of hash channels. I get confused about about block frequency, though. From the first post in this thread:
How does this work? I see real blocks in the block explorer sometimes only 10s older than the previous one. Does this mean that miner only got 10/60th of a reward for that block?

Does the hash mining success reset the prime mining, and vice versa? Or does every block need to have one hash success and one prime success?
My guess is either a hash or prime miner success resets the block, but the prime and hash mining rewards each have their own separate timers for partial rewards?

How is hash difficulty set? Is it adaptive, so perhaps if you get lots of 10s blocks from fast hash miners, the difficulty goes up until the frequency drops to an average of 1 m? Does hash difficulty change prime difficulty?

I didn't realize Nexus's prime numbers were so big! Are they 1024 bits?   I love the fact that the font has to be made SO SMALL just to put it onto the webpage.
How can you get a list of these records? I'm sure it's in the block database somehow, but is there a block explorer that shows them?  Your programmer friend obviously has a way to retrieve them.   Please show the top 1000 records, just because it'd be cool to show Nexus is computing interesting and useful math world record results, not (only) useless hashes like every other coin.