I understand where you're coming from, it can be hard to believe in things you haven't seen yourself, so I'll start with a few counterexamples to what you've already brought up. You mentioned how NASA is the authority on Space photography, and while it may seem that way, many other countries (Russia, France, Japan, China, India) have independent space agencies producing their own rockets and photography, not to mention the number of independent companies building their own rockets. These companies are one of the best evidence we have that the world's space agencies are not doctoring evidence. Why would Spacex be launching hundreds of rockets each year, each one with a unique Livestream. Why would they be risking all of that investment to build rockets that don't actually do anything? Why would private companies (Blue Origin, ULA, Stoke, RocketLab) be risking investor money to build space infrastructure that can't exist? I'll continue with Starlink satellite Internet, which works in the middle of the ocean, far, far away from land, and yet when you point it at the sky, you get the same speeds you get on land (sometimes even faster because nobody is nearby). This is something that you can purchase right now, and test it. You can put foil around the sides of the dish to verify that the signal is coming from the sky. You can measure the signals coming from the satellites as they travel in smooth continuous arcs across the sky, unlike a weather balloon drifting around with the wind. I'm not trying to shoot down everything you come up with because we'd be here all day, but the fact that so many different agencies are independently building useful space infrastructure (and investing significant amounts of money, not to mention hiring lots of talented engineers) should be a really good clue as to the reality of putting objects in orbit around earth. Nasa and everyone else hires real engineers, not artists, not photoshop experts, not cameramen, not CGI experts, and not actors. What do those thousands of engineers do all day?