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U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

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Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#871

Post by dr-detroit »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #742
moomoo11 wrote: post #395

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.

I think you're being overly generous in attributing competency/capability. Just thinking about the physics of it, robustly jamming an unknown signal of a transmitter 60KM high seems like a rather impossible task. If the air force were somehow broadcasting several megawatts of broad spectrum noise over a populated area, somebody would have noticed. The authorities in charge have no real idea what's going on or what th…

[dead]

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#872

Post by sfeng »

rossmohax wrote: post #866

If it was flying at 80000ft as initially reported, how did they shot it down? No fighter planes can fly that high. Did they wait until it lowered to the operating altitude?

The US has anti-satellite missiles, for example the RIM-161 [1]. That said, I would guess an AIM-120 [2] air-to-air missile wouldn't have any trouble given it can go Mach 4, I'm guessing a few miles up isn't the hardest thing.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#873

Post by [deleted] »

xxs wrote: post #846
riku_iki wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

electronics is damaged by water likely, it could have more chance to survive if hit the ground.

Water alone does not damage electronics - the electricity that flows through the water does, causing electrolysis. Most of the time the damage is also concentrated on the power delivery which tends to be trivial to repair. If the a higher voltage line (say 12V, 3.3V, etc) bridges to a dataline (around ~1V), it can fry ICs, though. For analysis even fried chips would be good enough.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#874

Post by aragonite »

jusonchan81 wrote: post #868

Doesn’t regular flights from China fly into US everyday? How hard would it be to hide and survey the path with some equipment? I understand it won’t cover a lot given restrictions in flight path, but there are a lot of cities into which the international flights make its way into.

Quite apart from commercial flights, stratosphereic balloon overlight itself is something that happens fairly frequently. There's a reason we didn't hear about it the 4-5 times it happened before within the past several years.

This is a Google balloon that recently fell out of the sky in the Congo: https://twitter.com/kambale/status/1621811081206439937

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#875

Post by sebzim4500 »

sabujp wrote: post #175
sebzim4500 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The balloon that was shot down was visible to the naked eye at 60k feet. It would have had to be far larger than the products you have linked to.

they expand

Not to 200 feet across they don't.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#876

Post by f5ve »

njharman wrote: post #781
Rebelgecko wrote: post #658

Is this the first time that the something was shot down over the continental US (outside of training)?

Apparently not, civil war and WWII (both balloons btw) search for "down" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Army_Balloon_Corps and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

haha, so the first military aircraft shot down over the US was a case of friendly-fire. The Union shot down it's own reconnaissance balloon, although technically the balloon was a civilian device.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#877

Post by aragonite »

prox wrote: post #815
aragonite wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't particularly like the precedent we just set especially in view of the fact that the upper limit of sovereign airspace is not defined by international law. In fact there are proposals to treat the 18-160km zone as a transitional region of reduced sovereignty akin to EEZs. https://iaass.space-safety.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2... > Legally however, it is an indistinct region where it is not clear whethe…

While that’s an admirable goal, in practice this is an operation above or in US airspace, which seemed to be unannounced by another nation state. There is little wiggle room for an honest blunder. China could have send out a press release their balloon was out of control or whatever.

I agree the visibility makes it worse, but my sense is that stratospheric balloon overflight is something that happens fairly frequently and most of the time does not cause diplomatic incidents (which explains why we heard nothing about it the 4-5 times it happened in the past several years). Another instance is this Google balloon that recently fell out of the sky in the Congo: https://twitter.com/kambale/status/1621811081206439937

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#878

Post by misja111 »

ipqk wrote: post #96
cududa wrote: post #25

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…

I don't know how big this particular one is, but high altitude balloons get really large because of the low pressure. For example, I could find that this ballon reaches 200ft diameter at 100,000 feet. https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm

But weather balloons are typically much smaller. See e.g. https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/, this is the largest one they sell and it has a bursting diameter of 45ft

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#879

Post by mlindner »

bxs24p wrote: post #858

The fact that this became a story at all is purely geopolitical in my opinion. Perhaps to do Blinkens up coming Beijing visit (which has since been canned). As far as I can tell the chinese dislike bad press like this. Having the balloon become a fiasco becomes a reason to cancel the trip. Can't exactly tell the why's but this is my guess.

The cancellation came from the US side, not the Chinese side.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#880

Post by sebzim4500 »

scotty79 wrote: post #167
sabujp wrote: post #146

Spy balloon cost : $3k - $50k , you can even buy them on alibaba and some other sites: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-hot-sale-surveillance-balloon-with_60454941082.html https://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/jennerjiang/product-list/catalog-1.html?view=0 Cost to shoot down balloon with F22 $400k for the AIM-9X, ~$85k for 1 hour of flight time, so ~$400 - $500k to shoot down one balloon that cost < $50k

I guess China just discovered a strategy how to drain US of some resources. Just let out a lot of scientific baloons and let the dirft away.

Congrats to China for wasting about 3 seconds worth of US military budget. How will the US recover from this catastrophe?
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