Tangible: Something you can touch, smell, taste, feel or see. Not guesswork and conjuring.
All scientific inquiry starts with a certain amount of conjecture, a hypothesis and a certain amount of guesswork. The key is to take your hypothesis and perform observations or replicable experiments to prove your hypothesis and then publish the results so that other scientists may duplicate your same observations or experiments and prove them to be either true or false.
The problem with articles like these and nearly all articles published for mass consumption, is that the hypothesis and published paper is often reported as “fact” when it has only been published and not yet duplicated, agreed upon or rejected upon peer review. And when subsequent peer review refutes the hypothesis, it’s often taken as “See, the scientists were wrong again!” when that is not at all the case.
The space program accelerated communication and computer technology in ways that would not have been possible without it. The type of communication necessary for the Moon landings would not have necessarily been thought of if not for the necessity of developing them, necessity being the mother of invention as it were. If you use a cell phone or have cable TV or satellite dish, thank in great part, the scientist at NASA.
When it comes to astronomy, it is not possible to touch, smell, taste, feel or see things that occurred in the distant past. But that doesn’t make it “conjuring” as in a magic trick or illusion.