I have worked on projects that launched on Lockheed satellites and Northrop rockets. Somehow I don't think you would be any more believing if I had worked at Boeing.
The people who build and operate the weather satellites have worked extensively with people from the Apollo missions. The companies and universities involved are massively intertwined. Sure some scientist could come up with a crappy or fraudulent analysis of data after the fact; but the projects all generally work unless one blows up like Challenger or some failed rocket launch.
The current major NOAA satellite generation, GOES-R, operates at 22,000 miles in altitude. There's one over the Eastern US coast and one over the Western US coast.
The GOES-R Series (a collaboration of NOAA and NASA) is the Western Hemisphere’s most advanced weather-monitoring satellite system.
www.goes-r.gov
If they were at 100,000ft that'd be off by a factor of over 1,000. None of the instruments on the satellites would work and we wouldn't be able to see the view that they have from that low altitude. There would be no way to control the satellites from their positions if they were at 100,000ft.
I watched the second one lift off at Cape Canaveral on a ULA rocket. So then the satellite would have to not "really" be aboard or something.
The satellites being at 100,000ft would mean that:
- Everything in mission operations rooms are wrong; in fact you couldn't even communicate with most of the satellites from where the mission operations room is.
- The engineers I know and worked with are wrong about everything they do, and also oblivious to the fact that all of their careers are beyond false
- Someone intercepts the radio signals and somehow includes transmissions that they are operating a "fake" satellite, and then feeds them enormous streams of data for decades in some instances. This fake data is so convincing that they believe it for their entire careers and none of them can figure it out
- One satellite orbits the earth something like 7x per day. If it was only at 100,000ft it'd be quickly incinerated by the atmosphere traveling that fast.
- Every member of my family is wrong about everything they did in aerospace; their careers there are 100% false, yet they also successfully built things like radiation therapy machines, or missiles.
It'd be easier for me to believe that we are in a simulation like The Matrix.
Would any of you consider ever visiting an Aerospace lab and taking a tour? You could visit a NASA facility or any number of public labs at major US universities. Then you could point out to the tour guide which missions are fake and which are real and how you figured that out.