Presumably the one big satellite was intended to be backhaul for the solar planes. They can probably buy that backhaul from someone else with less risk and effort.

It looks like the approach was different: instead of having several thousand of small and 'cheap' satellites, they were aiming for an expensive and big one.

Presumably this is because of the cost of launching the satellites (obviously quite a bit more than racking a server in a data center).

Nonetheless, if this strategy beats the latency, then I agree that it's the right one.