The title is self explanatory, could there be a setting to keep satellites in orbit forever?

Absolutely - I will work on making that available with the next version. I appreciate the suggestion!

Sweet! Honestly it would make it more realistic given the satellites are in 'orbit'

From a gameplay perspective, I could see that - that makes sense.

The thought process I had initially though, was that it was to be another logistics puzzle to solve/automate; that is, as satellites run out of fuel, or their hardware breaks down, new satellites would need to be sent up - hence them having a limited timespan.

I personally enjoyed setting up combinators to automatically launch a satellite every X number of minutes, prioritizing quality ones; on the other hand though, I get that that may not be what everyone is looking for/wants.

My work-around is to set the "How long will a satellite remain in orbit" parameter to be very large.

I'm curious if you get annoyed by the "satellite ran out of fuel" message in the late game when you have a regular launch schedule? I added an "Allow out of fuel message" setting, and then conditioned the print statement based on this setting.

So, it turns out while I did change the How long will a satellite remain in orbit setting to allow infinite duration (set it to 0), I forgot to update the setting description to denote that, my apologies. This is to say, since version 0.7.0 I believe, satellites will remain in orbit indefinitely if the aforementioned setting is set to a value of 0.

As far as the "out of fuel" message, to be honest, I must have tuned it out to a large degree; but I certainly get it being irritating. Will plan on adding a setting akin to what you've mentioned when I get the chance.