For an RE'er, you sound suspiciously like an FE'er sock puppet.
Wow. Who knew?
I don't know if you're a sock puppet, an FE'er disguised as an RE'er, or just a really crappy RE'er, and frankly it doesn't matter which is true.
Actually, I think this analogy is quite valid. Direct measurement trumps all other kinds of evidence, hands down.
It's valid, but not in the way you two have interpreted it; copperfield is in complete control of the environment he performs his tricks in. He can only fool the audience members sitting in the auditorium under his control. As even nasa devil pointed out, by leaving his audience and going somewhere esle to watch the statue you can disprove the reality of the trick. Being NASA's audience is watching the launches and landings at Kennedy - they control that environment and can put on a show that is somewhat inconclusive to the reality of spaceflight. By observing their spacecraft away from their facilities, in random locations all over the world, you take the "performance" out of the equation. They do not control where or when you observe it from, and there is no way they can fake it for every possible point of view. In fact, any attempt at fakery would be immediately obvious to all but a single small location at most.
Your refusal to accept the very simple reasons why "direct measurements" are less reliable than detecting space travel shows that you're not what you claim to be, or are very poor at being what you claim to be. It's not hard to grasp, temperature inversions can offset the effect of earth's curvature, and the opposite mirage could hypothetically offset the effect of earth's proposed flatness. Direct measurements are therefore inconclusive because of a well-understood phenomenon, not because of mindless speculation which can't even produce a plausible alternative.
Until a suitable explanation is provided which debunks the FE canal experiments (I think there exist many actually, but you'll have to convince them of that),
I just provided you an entirely valid reason to distrust any canal experiment measurements of the earth's surface, regardless of what model the results indicate. Your refusal to see how it makes that experiment less reliable than spacecraft positional measurement is astounding for someone who claims to be an RE'er.
they have every reason to distrust the validity of observations of spacecraft which conform to the RE model.
No, they don't, they don't even have an explanation for the measurements that confirm the orbits of spacecraft, let alone confirmation of comet impacts. The only suitable explanation is that RE is real and their measurements are unreliable for reasons detailed above.