741–750 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really believe the USAF and rest of the military and 3 letter agencies had not already intercepted/jammed/hacked the comms link? By letting it saunter all the way across they also probably got a lot of good info on its capabilities.
FWIW, all comms of that balloon would be satellite. I don't think it is easy to jam, let alone intercept.
I feel like the balloon takedown was seriously mishandled. Imo it should have been shot down right after it crossed our borders and before it started move over populated areas. That way there would be no surveillance and you could examine the payload. Now that it’s in the water, you may not even find it.
Do you really believe the USAF and rest of the military and 3 letter agencies had not already intercepted/jammed/hacked the comms link? By letting it saunter all the way across they also probably got a lot of good info on its capabilities.
The authorities in charge have no real idea what's going on or what the payload is. This whole situation is just weird. Maybe it is just some irresponsible private organization. The Baidu equivalent of Project Loon?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery. Is that true? Just from quickly poking around, LEO satellites seem to orbit at about triple the height, moving far faster than a balloon lazily floating along the jetstream. Probably can use a larger variety of instruments as well.
LEO (300-1500km) is much higher than the apparent 60,000 ft altitude of this balloon (18km).
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Name one plane that flies at more than 60,000 feet, I'll wait.
If you believe the Chinese officials, they had lost control of the balloon. Things that go up must famously go down, though that's not their department said Wernher Von Braun.
I feel like the balloon takedown was seriously mishandled. Imo it should have been shot down right after it crossed our borders and before it started move over populated areas. That way there would be no surveillance and you could examine the payload. Now that it’s in the water, you may not even find it.
NYTimes is reporting that this is actually the fifth balloon to cross into our airspace. First four were seemingly ignored, three times under the Trump administration and once before during Biden’s.
Is this balloon incident something the Space Force is mandated to deal with? The balloon was shot down by an F-22 and is being recovered by the Navy and Coast Guard, but there is no mention of the Space Force.
Because it wasn't in space.
> shot down by an F-22
Because it was in the air.
> is being recovered by the Navy and Coast Guard
Because now it's in the water.
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It could’ve actually been a “science experiment” just launched at the behest of the military as a test like you say. So they’d have plausible deniability like the “fishing boats” in the South China Sea
Why would there need to be any plausible deniability for flying a spy aircraft over another country? The U-2 spy plane did just that, as did Project Genetrix (Unmanned surveillance balloons), and then later, the SR-71 Blackbird, and as much as the Soviets complained, complaining and shooting at them was pretty much all they could do. They shot down/recovered so many Project Genetrix balloons, in fact, that their left…
Because they’re denying it. Presumably, they’d want their denial to be plausible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name one plane that flies at more than 60,000 feet, I'll wait.
Concorde did [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
The comment you replied to says "no commercial aircraft flies at that altitude" and the concorde hasn't flown in decades.