By international space law states are responsible in full for any liability caused by a launch. Insurance companies are only 2nd tier and obviously a government will refuse to allow any launch that's considered too risky.

There are international laws about rocket launches and insurance. In particular there are no liability limits. And the state that does the launch assumes full responsability.
Insurance companies are partially covered by state insurance but if serious shit happens (foreign city obliterated by out of control rocket) they will go bankrupt and the launching organization will go bankrupt and most likely in jail and the launching state could still go bankrupt or in a war.
Facing these risks imagine how many insurance companies can do that and how high are the fees, especially for new unproven launchers.

We are very good at spending money and producing useless scientific papers.
My experience while working at a state owned research institute:
- Phase X of project needs buying some equipment
- Only 30-60% money available
- Write useless study to justify spending the money
- Move acquisition to next phase
- Repeat until project gets buried

Besides the voice network's control channel the short messages can also be transported on the data network which has a much higher capacity even for 2G.
All those phones that normally stay connected to the Internet (pretty much all smartphones and feature phones) can send and receive SMS with little latency and with less congestion.
For the operators short messages are still a cash cow and will remain so even if they reduce prices 10 times.

Place the solar cells on the ground, focus extra light on them with space based mirrors.
Thin metallized plastic foil mirrors are light and can be made much larger than cells for same payload weight.
Unfortunately it can also be used as space weapon.

A reflector (mirror) is a much better solution for increasing the energy delivered to ground.
It can be very thin and light so it can be made very large. It is also possible to focus several mirrors over the same area.
Unfortunately it will still make a pretty good weapon...

Considering my age and health - I'll pass.
However, if a cyborg or fully synthetic body becomes possible meanwhile...

Better: don't buy at all.
I have an excess of Nokia, Samsung and HTC chargers, all compatible. I just pick the nearest one..

Pretty much none of the major providers issue ancient SIMs with DES OTA signing. For the old cards never replaced they may just deactivate them in HLR and wait for subscribers to complain to support.
On the other hand cheap Chinese SIMs are still issued in some countries. The only relief is that some of them don't support OTA at all...

We didn't hire even one engineer under 30 - they simply don't have the skills and the patience.

Rockets have failure modes in which they can fall quite far away with plenty fuel remaining.
Launching without an automatic self-destruct system is totally irresponsible. Oh, wait, this is Russia...

Perhaps for safety reasons the self-destruct arms itself later in flight - although getting horizontal should trigger an immediate self-destruct.
Even rocket scientists get lousy - perhaps from hunger?

The system uses Cell Broadcast, not SMS.
CB works pretty much like teletext or CC on TV so in a few seconds all phones in an area can be alerted without any extra network usage.
On the other hand SMS uses paging, channel acquisition and a temporary connection. A flood of short messages can bloxk the network just like it happens on New Year.

echo "Goodbye cruel world!"; rm -rf /

Next move is to install some of the "other" Rheinmetall products on the drones and the grafitti problem will be solved fully automatically >:->