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In fact, that’s exactly what LightSail is using to control its attitude: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/2016/20160418-lig...

Statutory limit is actually 20 years, under 18 U.S.C. § 1341 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1341

In practice, most of the defendants would be likely to get under 5 years assuming this is their first offense, don’t commit further crimes, etc.

Good question. The vast majority of satellite communications today are conducted via geostationary orbit, 35,786 km above the earth. This is the distance at which a satellite orbiting around the equator moves with the same velocity as the surface of the earth, keeping the satellite in a fixed position. This is good for communicating via the ground, since you can just set up your dish pointing in the direction of the satellite. Additionally, such a satellite can cover a wide swath of the earth since it is so far away; see, for example, the coverage of AsiaSat-8 (http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08...). The disadvantage (especially for internet) is that the round-trip time of a signal at the speed of light is on the order of 250 ms.

As described in this article, the SpaceX constellation would be in a much lower orbit. The advantage is a much faster ping time (say, around 10 ms). The disadvantage is you need a large number of satellites to provide continuous coverage for the entire earth...but that's less of a disadvantage if your company also launches rockets.

As a rocket combustion chamber grows larger, so does the chance of a destructive combustion instability. The Russian solution was to split that up into smaller chambers resulting in multiple nozzles. It was a practical solution to a challenging engineering problem.