  Low-Earth Orbit satellites have gained momentum to provide Internet
connectivity, augmenting those in the long-established geostationary orbits. At
the same time, QUIC has been developed as the new transport protocol for the
web. While QUIC traffic is fully encrypted, intermediaries such as performance
enhancing proxies (PEPs) - in the past essential for Internet over satellite
performance - can no longer tamper with and optimize transport connections. In
this paper, we present a satellite emulation testbed and use it to compare QUIC
and TCP as well as HTTP/3 and HTTP/1.1 with and without minimal PEP
functionality. Evaluating goodput over time, we find that the slow start
threshold is reached up to 2s faster for QUIC PEP in comparison to QUIC
Non-PEP. Moreover, we find that HTTP/3 and HTTP/3-PEP outperform HTTP/1.1 and
HTTP/1.1-PEP in multiple web performance scenarios, where HTTP/3-PEP improves
over HTTP/3 for Page Load Time by over 7s in edge cases. Hence, our findings
hint that these performance gains may warrant exploring PEPs for QUIC.
