Its an honor to have you posting here Richard.
The massive ships that JLW has detected are part of our space based weapons fleet.
At present there are between 8 and 12 orbiting space weapons and manufacturing platforms manned and supported by a corps of almost 5000 astronauts (Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA) all (ostensibly) under USSCOM.
The space shuttle and its quarterly jaunts to the ISS is a diversion to the real mission in which we, Russian and others are allied.
We currently launch astronauts in Delta, Zenit 3SL's, Titans, and Atlases. There are probably other highly classified manned launch vehicles (single stage to orbit and return).
There are about 20 major launch facilities located throughout the world in addition to the Ronald Reagan Launch Complex on Kwaljalein, Vandenberg, Patrick AFB, Wallops Island and of course Kennedy.
Several in both Russia, China and Australia.
By the way, when it takes the space shuttle 3 days to 'catch up' to the ISS what is really happening is that it is making deliveries of food and cargo to the weapons and manufacturing platforms. That’s why when it opens its doors at the ISS it is always half empty.
The reason that two Russian Progress rockets have always just arrived at the ISS when the Space Shuttle gets there is that the cargo from the Progess rocket is loaded into the Shuttle and when it undocks it goes to other space weapons platforms to deliver more food and cargo.
Look at it this way; it takes 55 minutes to deorbit and land at Kennedy from the ISS. Did you every wonder why it always takes over 48 hours to accomplish that?
Yeah, yeah, I know. The astronaut union wants 2 consecutive 8 hours rest periods before deorbit burn and landing.
By the way, one of the weapons platforms was the one that used the molecular disassociation technology to reduce both WTC towers to ash.
There are some pretty nasty kitties out there.