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As a data point: previously spotted surveillance blimps in the Asia Pacific theatre use a clear balloon. Either China wanted to see if it would be detected, or is woefully behind the US equivalents.
equivalents such as: the U2 spyplane, the BlackBird and all of the satellites they have. Oh and all the GlobalHawks.
I wonder where the cutting edge is today?
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True, although from up there you can collect a lot more than on the ground of course. The US does the same thing over international waters off China. The other concern would be if it has jamming capabilities, you can jam an earth station pretty easily from a balloon and effectively blind our satellites. Even if there is wreckage, you can tell if there is offensive signal equipment like that.
> The US does the same thing over international waters off China. That's a good observation. Maybe the simplest explanation is China's "force majeure" claim was "true" and this was a wayward airship that was supposed to have transited the US west coast and Mexico or Latin America. Just like U.S. observational activities in international waters, just a little more invasive. Thus, when the military mentions they are tr…
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Its not like USA have never violated other nations air space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnais... but I guess we quit doing it to China https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-o...
And until a couple of years ago, we also allowed it. >The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them. >[...] >On 22 Novem…
The big question is why China would send a balloon. My best guess is it carried electronic warfare sensors to try and collect specific information about US radar and missile capabilities. They may have in fact wanted us to shoot it down, ideally first painting it with advanced radar (both air and ground based) and then firing an advanced missile at it. Data could be streamed out until the moment of impact and used to…
... why didn't they simply declared it a shooting range target? thousands of volunteers would have tried to shoot it down with bullets and various DIY things! it would have been endless streaming content! oh, well, maybe the next one. :(
Statistically unlikely to hit someone, but not surprising if it happened.
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…
It looks like the large size is mostly just solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) and their scaffolding. From some of the available photos there's two wings, each with eight panels. 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…
And if they could, other countries would love to shoot them out of the air and it would be fair. You don't put planes like the U2 in operation without being aware of the risks.
I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by pointing that out.
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... why didn't they simply declared it a shooting range target? thousands of volunteers would have tried to shoot it down with bullets and various DIY things! it would have been endless streaming content! oh, well, maybe the next one. :(
Randomly Firing thousands of round at a target about ten miles up at an angle making the trajectories of misses to be something like 30 mi arcs sounds like a great idea doesn’t it? Does a ground fired bullet even go that high? They’ll obviously know their bullets are landing in safe areas right and no Minneapolis or wherever? Statistically unlikely to hit someone, but not surprising if it happened.
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I saw it from my car today while driving before I knew it was going to be in my area. It was very visible to the naked eye. It was large enough that the perspective made it seem a lot lower altitude than it actually was.
Not sure what the CCP is thinking. Are they simply trying to instigate a response with such a brazen display?
I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population?
How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down?
If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.
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.
I disagree. The spy balloon was likely inspected shortly before it entered US territory and the military deemed it as something that was not critical and simply moved anything sensitive out of the way of the a balloon. Meanwhile they likely monitored the emissions of the balloon to do intelligence collecting of Chinese capabilities. The DoD said they were aware of the balloon shortly after it left China and were moni…
One, that region is considered the countries airspace.
Two, we can distroy and keep spy gear.
Both are useful rules to bring up in the future.
The U-2 and SR-71 both stopped flying due to the risk of being downed and not moral consequences. Similarly the US (probably) stopped spying on allies due to the risk of another whistleblower and not moral reasons.
At the same time, similar events have happened to establish that space spy satillites are okay.
Finally, this is easy to forget esp. if you're a US citizen. Most of the world considers this incident a bit of a joke. Official responses are along standard narrative lines.
But no one really cares, the US reacted like this because it didn't know why China would want to use this balloon to spy and so wants to nip this activity in the bud.
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Okay, genius: explain how easy it is to generate as good imagery at 80,000 feet (almost ten times the typical aerial imagery altitude) from a platform being buffeted and spun and tilted by the wind with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon. Now compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery in their choice of bands. Commercial satellites c…
> explain how easy it is to generate as good imagery at 80,000 feet Camera gimbals provide image stability regardless of motion in 3D space. Digital post processing is used to clean up images from planes and other moving sources. > with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon. People seem to really underestimate the size of these balloons. They are hundreds of feet across and capable of lifting massive loa…
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Turnaround/prototyping. Getting a sensor onto a spy sat is a multi-year process of testing and validating. But a new balloon can probably be built and flown in a matter of weeks. So any country trying to learn how to spy from above might want to build up the relevant corporate knowledge using balloons.
Why did they need to test it over the United States though? If the purpose was prototyping you’d think they could have done that locally
Probably also why such a dramatic response from the US.
Before satillites flew over enemies no one was too sure if they'd be attacked immediately (they weren't).