I realized that, but decided not to comment on it. The actual distance is not significantly different from that to have great bearing on your analysis. I believe somewhere in this thread someone estimated that at the time of this picture the Shuttle was 200-300 miles from the camera, but I'm not going to look for it. I've no reason to doubt that ball park estimate, especially given the 4miles/sec speed the Shuttle was travelling at the time. Sounds reasonable to me.
That leads me to wonder just what kind of cameras the conspiracy theorists have, by the way. I figure that in a thousandth of a second exposure the Shuttle would have travelled around 15-20 feet. Wreaks havoc on the clarity you can get... to say nothing about the kind of lensing and tracking required to get anywhere near that kind of film speed capability even ignoring the plasma effects ... Oh, but we know NASA and the AF are hiding loads of info, so they must be able to do it... just snap their fingers...