I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4 school busses. I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story. But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion? I ask simply becaus…
There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping the thing would stay aloft for a long time?
My guess is that the actual package of equipment - batteries and sensors - is quite small. Maybe a telescope and gyro stabilizer or gimbal was part of the setup. Insulation probably bulked it up quite a bit; it's very, very cold at that altitude.
I'd be curious what sort of uplink they were using, assuming the thing was actually fully functional as a spying device. I'd say there is a decent chance it was largely a dummy, designed to see what our reaction would be.
I don't particularly like the precedent we just set. There's no evidence it was a weapon, its flight path was easily tracked and slow so our military could hardly argue it was a surveillance threat especially compared to satellites, it's well outside commercial aviation flight ranges.
If they want to send balloons over us at 80,000 feet...let them? Who cares? They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery.
We can hardly point fingers. The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.