I think it is reasonable to lift the orbit of hubble. For the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NASA announced in 2025 that a private company will lift its orbit which should be done by mid 2026. (space.com Article) And it “only” costs 30 million $, which is really cheap compared to designing, building and launching science satellites.

As always, there is a relevant xkcd:

You could also try microcontroller programming. There you have control over everything and i guess it should be similiar to programming in early days. I started around ten years ago with Arduino and also directly programming them and it still interests me. And with a little hardware you could do some interesting projects. I would even say it could be relevant for career if you want that.