8000 feet standing on a mountain isn’t the same as being 8000 feet above the ground. It’s likely that what you’ve experienced is some combination of air from lower altitudes being carried by wind blowing up the mountain, and the ground absorbing sunlight and warming up the air.
Without either of those things, the temperature in open sky is likely to be colder than a mountaintop at similar altitude
That’s half the point of what they’re proposing.
They’re saying they’ll build the satellites and ground stations, but sell them to governments. It’ll be the Ukrainians operating this system, and there will probably be other copies of the system owned and run by other governments
“upshot” doesn’t mean, or even imply, that it’s a good thing. It just means something “result” or “consequence”
Degrees aren’t a metric unit, actually. Gradians were an attempt to make a metric unit for angles, but nobody uses those so it didn’t really work.
The people who designed and will use this telescope will be using “steredians”, which is square radians. That’s the unit which astrophysicists use for describing an area of the sky
Also, aircraft go far higher than 8000 feet. Crusing altitudes can be more like 20,000 or 30,000