I completely agree with your general point. But it is nuclear fission that produces the heat that runs the battery, it's just not a chain reaction.

Telescopes on the moon only make sense if you can build them out of local lunar materials. Otherwise you're 0) Building telescope components on Earth 1) Launching telescope components into Earth orbit 2) Transfer to Lunar orbit and Landing them on the moon 3) Assembling them Skip step 2. It's easier to design a telescope to be in microgravity then something that has to contend with a significant gravitational field.

The atmosphere is not a friend to astronomers. Both emission from and absorption by the atmosphere are significant problems for ground-based astronomy. The background from just the brightness of the sky is the largest contaminate in ground-based images. From space Hubble enjoys a sky background that is at least 100 times fainter. So to get a given sensitivity, Hubble can observe things in one hour that might take a ground-based telescope 10-20 hours.

There's such a fine line between trolling and irony.

I can never tell when I'm falling for a math troll, but to be rather simplistic about "better":
50% vs. 50% is 1 : 1
75% vs. 25% is 3 : 1, i.e. 3 times better
90% vs. 10% is 9 : 1, i.e. 9 times better

They're not rewarded by grants, salary, promotion, respect, or tenure for putting in any extra effort to make it work. What really matters is getting more grant money and writing new papers. They're effectively punished for spending their time doing anything else.

Science makes progress through experiments. You design an experiment; you figure out what measurements you need to make; you make those measurements according to the requirements and specifications of your experiment; what do you need to control for? what calibrations are important? how much data do you need for a statistically significant sample? The answers to all of these questions are different depending on the experiment you want to do. Using data from someone else experiment means you have to go through all of these steps and then try to account for that fact that they way the data were gathered isn't quite right for what you want to do, you need to control for different things than the original experimenters, etc. This takes generally takes expertise in both the original scientific question and the new one. I get enough citations and questions from good-intentioned, responsible astronomers who use our data in published papers in subtly, but significantly, incorrect ways. I try to deal with such occurrences helpfully, but if often takes a long time to guide the interested fellow astronomer through the relevant literature explaining why what they did isn't quite right. When I write about something in a field that's new to me, I'm quite sensitive to this and try to check extensively that I'm not making a classic 1st-year graduate student mistake in that field. Don't even get me started on all of the email I get with re-analyses of our data by retired engineers.

Most ethical standards of scientific societies are quite clear that retaining records and the original data are a vital part of the scientific process.

Absolutely. The public should have access to the data. Public grants then also need to pay for curating the data. Libraries aren't free, archives aren't free, package data in an actually useful form takes precious time, which is scientists most precious resource. Having data in a form that is useful to the 25 people in your research group is very different than providing data that can be used by thousands of people. It's analogous to the difference between the quick bash script you have that backs up your movies to your external hard drive, and having something that you're willing to distribute to 1000 people and provide support.

Most scientific journal copyright agreements do not restrict authors right to reproduce data from their papers. The copyright is very specifically on the copy-edited published manuscript. The publisher often _manages_ copyright on behalf of the author or society for copyright enforcement and for granting permission for reproductions. The data can definitely be made available. Read the copyright transfer agreements carefully. The real problem in all of this is that: "here is the raw data file in my custom format" is not that useful. Curation of data is important, data should be publically available, and that needs to be funded.

And I suppose that's really the distinction. If you asked people, "does the copier right now have a copy of that page you just copied?" that might not be surprised by that, but "does the copier right now have a copy of that page you copied last year?" they would be, and the difference comes down to how much storage and whether or not you have persistent storage.

Storage space you have access to and storage space used by the machine don't have to be the same thing.

When you make 10 copies of something, it only scans the original once. That means that the image is being stored somewhere. The only question then is for how long is that image stored. It's reasonable to assume that it's stored until that space is needed for something else, so the lifetime is going to be directly a function of the size of the internal storage device.