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"The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across." - https://eventhorizontelescope....

you would think that with all the video and images they show of europa, this wouldn't be a "might" or "scientists think". is everything nasa shows bullshit?

No, just it's worth to read descriptions under the images, they say if it's an artist impression or an actual photo.

For now humankind landed on (except Earth): Moon, Venus, Mars, asteroid Ryugu, asteroid Itokawa, comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and Saturn moon Titan, there were a few impactors, which I did not count, so any other pictures are taken from orbit sometimes just by flying by with a great speed, which makes any detail surface features not visible.

So any images of exoplanets, black holes or any surface except the mentioned above are artists impressions. There is a project though to take an image of a black hole's event horizon.

Great, more bandwidth for my fridge. And once they run out of repositioning fuel there'll be 75 more pieces of space junk in orbit.

People partially have already commented, just as anonymous so here is my summary:

1. Satellites: nowadays technology allows for LEO (low Earth orbit) deployment of clusters of communication satellites, where there is still some drag from air molecules, which results in orbit decay, e.g. ISS has to boost its orbit regularly (also such orbits allow for low latency communication), additionally nowadays satellites are required to have either deorbiting capability or moving to so called "graveyard" orbits, where, even when decommissioned do not pose thread to other space assets.

2. Internet for everybody: maybe you live in an urban area, so having high bandwidth internet is nothing special, but there are rural places or undeveloped countries, where building infrastructure for high bandwidth internet is too expensive and many people do not have it, so having a global internet access is not only good for people, who do not have it, but also for humanity as a whole in case of any disasters or for automatic science data collectors. An example: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - not only we would've known where, but maybe even people could've been saved. Another example (less drastic) is Event Horizon Telescope, people take airplanes to carry TBs of data on hard-drives - in this case a proper bandwidth would be required.

but whose details elude us and which it may be physically impossible to ever observe directly

Not impossible, just need to wait about 10 years.

I am surprised they don't mention the Event Horizon Telescope, which could resolve this.

There are no black holes until we find one. All we have so far is that we ran out of alternative ideas, so we assume the supermassive compact object in the centers of galaxies are black holes. That is actually not quite true, there is an alternative to general relativity in the vicinity of black holes:
http://www.worldscientific.com...

Wait for the results of the Event Horizon Telescope this/next year. Then we will know which one is right: http://www.eventhorizontelesco...