Credit: u/mclumber1
How much fire and smoke is that? How does it compare to, like, one small town's daily car usage? And what is that smoke? Depending on the rocket you're looking at, it could literally be water vapor.
And what about the tens of thousands of lives these satellites have saved? The information we get from satellites is indispensable for disaster relief. Even just the "nifty pictures" we get would be worth it to help emergency services determine where they're needed most, let alone the wealth of information we can use to determine when, where, and how severely a storm will hit days in advance. There's a reason that deaths from natural disasters have plummeted since we started sending cameras into space.
You don't have to be dug into an incorrect position. It's better to have been wrong about something than to be wrong about something.