Iridium Pilot already exists, albeit it's only 134 kbps (although maybe it's already been upgraded to 1 Mbps? I'm not sure). VSAT service may also work (although that might be spotty in the middle of the ocean).
Thats really really expensive for not a lot of data. Click the wrong link from HN front page and you could burn through half that in one click!
I suppose it could be doable. You'd want to be setup with all your software and development environment before hand and just use the satellite connection for text-only email/chat. Maybe SSH to an outside server and use w3m for web browsing?