What do you think of this solution to the speed up : with enough colonists, they can help parallelize the project, so I can add some controls to multiply the number of satellites launched for each, say, 10000 colonists. So in the mid game this becomes a non-issue and we can launch pretty much all of them pretty quickly. This would not impact the early game pacing.
I like to imagine HOPE is launching those by itself, so it would need help to launch more than one at once. Makes sense?
I am not a big fan of increasing the maximum amount of satellites though. I think they should saturate and 1000 is plenty. But I'll keep it in mind.