Satellites as we a lead to perceive them are completely unnecessary and impractical when compared to ground based antennas that we use everyday.
We are lead to believe that we use satellites everyday for our communication but this is simply not true.
Transatlantic cables provide the communication between countries and ground based towers take care of the mobile network, GPS (Originally called Ground Positioning System) also uses these same towers by the triangulation of how long two or more time stamped signals take to arrive at the receiver.
Satellite dishes are using troposcatter or refraction from the ionosphere to extend the range of the receiver from the transmitters ground antenna.
The alleged communication satellites are over 600klms away, we are lucky to connect 30klm from a cell tower with our small battery powered handsets. Notwithstanding the requirement for the signal to be able to penetrate 4 layers of the atmosphere including the ionosphere and troposphere which is known and used everyday to scatter and refract radio signals.
Then there is the small problem of the thermosphere reaching temperatures of upto 2000°C as taught to us.
Images for maps are taken from high altitude helium crafts and stitched together to make a single composite image. You can verify this yourself by observing the shadows in the images. Shadows extend longer to the left and right as you look past the cameras view point which is overhead and there are no shadows, this is then mirrored where the addional camera images are joined.