There's two things going on here:

1. escape velocity is related to distance. eg: Solar escape is ~42 km/s at Earth's distance, but some 600 km/s if you start at the photosphere. see eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#/media/File:Voyager_2_velocity_vs_distance_from_sun.svg for how it falls off.

2. The 26 km/s is a hyperbolic excess velocity. Not so much its current speed (though this is quite close), as how fast it would be going in an idealized case where it can get arbitrarily far from the Sun and we can ignore the rest of the galaxy, etc.

As best I'm aware, this is one of the more thorough descriptions of the Venera programs: http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm

If anything, Blue Origin seems to be doing rather more flights: https://www.blueorigin.com/new-shepard/reserve-a-seat/

https://www.russianspaceweb.com/energia.html and https://www.russianspaceweb.com/buran.html come to mind as sources if you don't want wikipedia.

A lot of different things in terms of gas and dust. see eg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_nebula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_nebula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_nebula

Some of them can be seen with smaller telescopes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets

Because of how they work, it makes more sense to talk about a telescope's light gathering ability and angular resolution than how far it can see. If you're including a specific detector (your eyes, some CCD, whatever), you can also directly talk about the faintest objects possible.

Water (in the form of ice) is quite common in the outer solar system. Water shortages in the present/near future are more about clean water.

Huygens was looking downwards because questions about the surface were more important. see eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)#Findings

No probes have landed on any of Jupiter's moons, though those sorts of images are occasional subjects of paintings and renderings.

The kinds you're describing are short-range systems that need to push off of something. So one could plausibly imagine a maglev train on the Moon, but not for deep space propulsion.

Magnets are involved in some types of ion engines (eg: hall effect thrusters), though those move more in common with conventional rockets.

No, the timescales are too long.

see eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protostar and this graph for protostars reaching the main sequence.

They're orbiting at different speeds, with the inner planets moving much faster than the outer ones. So you get curves like: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro801/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.astro801/files/image/keplerian_orbit_lbl.jpg

Check out chapter 3 of the 2013 decadal survey, as well as big chunks of the 2022 decadal survey

It's hard to tell with these questions. I actually was wondering if this was one of those word-salad sentences and they were asking about "explanations", or there was some untranslated word or something.

I'm going to assume that "ecuasions" is a mispelling of equations. While typically not taught at the high school level, a few relevant equations related to the patched conic approximation (or rocketry in general) come to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodynamics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis-viva_equation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

Sort of. JWST's halo orbit is around the L2 point instead of at it, and requires the occasional correction.

(way around it, Earth never gets in front of the sun: https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-observatory-characteristics/jwst-orbit)

No, for a few different reasons.

A planet that's tidally locked cannot have a planet/moon in a stationary orbit, because that orbit would lie outside the planet's [sphere of influence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodynamics)).

An alternative reading of the question could be having body B at the L2 Lagrange point, though that's an unstable orbit, and the body would no longer be perfectly aligned in very short order (and out from the L2 point entirely fairly quickly).

Only if your definition of "comfortable" includes roomates. Otherwise you're looking at >50% of your income going into rent.

A key feature of space is that it's relatively empty. Especially as you get farther out.

While the Voyagers don'tt have detectors for dust impacts, I did find this from New Horizons:

> the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter only counted a single dust particle within five days of the [Pluto] flyby. This is similar to the density of dust particles in free space in the outer solar system — about 6 particles per cubic mile

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/top-new-horizons-findings-reported-in-science/

Mostly because of Earth's orbital eccentricity. Seriously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time

Having it not be dark out when I'm waking up is nice, though

Why do you keep on asking variants of this question and then deleting the posts?

It's ambiguous.

Mass-wise, it's a more or less smooth transition from the jovian planets to low-mass brown dwarfs.

Radius tends to get influenced in a somewhat complicated way by mass, and as far as the gas giants go, hotter planets tend to be larger than cooler ones. Measurement errors make this subject to change, but a hand-wavey figure would be ~2x Jupiter at the upper limit.

An honorable mention goes to mamajek's object due to its giant ring system.

The direction was changing a lot when it was deeper in the sun's gravity well and during the Jupiter/Saturn flybys, but currently roughly towards Ophiucus: https://heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx

(note the use of right ascension/declination instead of north/south/east/west, as those would change with your location on earth, time of day, and the seasons)