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Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

abcnews.go.com

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Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#461

Post by nl »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #419
idlewords wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not. The descriptions are consistent with these objects being balloons or dirugibles. The terrestrial technology that can keep a cylinder the size of a car afloat for days is called "hydrogen".

I don’t think this is correct… a thousand cubic feet of hydrogen is 68lbs of buoyancy at sea level. A cylinder that was 20’ long, and 5’ in radius (which is a lot bigger than my minivan - would be about 1570 cubic feet. That could lift about 100lbs at sea level… at flight level 400… that’s going to have to be a huge balloon to lift 100 lbs or the payload has to be tiny tiny - which is possible but I don’t think somet…

> A cylinder that was 20’ long, and 5’ in radius

Your are dramatically underestimating the size of these things:

The Chinese high-altitude balloon shot down over the Atlantic off the coast of South Carolina over the weekend was 200 feet tall and carried a payload the size of a regional airliner, a U.S. Air Force general said in a briefing on Monday.

The balloon's superstructure and hardware weighed "in excess of a couple thousand pounds," said Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-spy-balloon-size-200-ft-jet-a...

Here's a similar sized one NASA put up a few years ago: https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#462

Post by culi »

localplume wrote: post #131
georgeg23 wrote: post #6

Balloons could be a clever counter to what the US is doing with Low Earth Orbit satellites recently. SpaceX is launching tons of spy/missile defense satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm More details: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Star…

Surveillance satellites are very different to directly flying this equipment into US airspace, including the fact that this equipment could hold paylods other than ISR. Not to mention this comment implies China does not have equivalent spy satellites, which it does. Also the UN is an absolute joke. That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS. Also forge…

> That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS

Right, that's why we should only ever trust Radio Free Asia for our news sources about what's happening internationally

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#463

Post by undersuit »

giantg2 wrote: post #408
elorant wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF they’re dummies why bother shooting them down?

We won't know that until the debris is recovered. There's no way to know what payload the next one will be carrying either.

And what if it's just "upcycled" electronics. We could spend a boat load trying to recover bogus data from seawater logged flash drives for nothing.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#464

Post by culi »

benatkin wrote: post #451
esperent wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific? I'm from a country that people would consider part of "The West". However we've never attacked anyone except invaders in entire country's history. I'm sure you could dredge up some connection to the US and get angry with us about it, if you were an Islamic extremist or something. More realistically though, you could find fault with any country with that attitude. Speaking of current geopolit…

This would have to be addressed knowing the details of the country. It's hand-waving to say that a country has never attacked. For instance, Ireland lets attacking aircraft use their facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality

Right and all of the EU benefits and invests in the World Bank which is one of the major forces used to keep the third world always in a state of "developing" through structural adjustment policies that keep them from ever actually developing

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#465

Post by undersuit »

prawn wrote: post #262
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agitator, indubitably. I don’t see how that’s even a question, respectfully. Otherwise you’re following the logic of the Stop hitting yourself! defense.

Can you think of anything that the agitator could launch with plausible deniability, such that shooting it down with a missile and maybe creating further trouble, wouldn't divide the opinions of the host nation? e.g., if the dangerous substance in question was a gas mix for the balloon or cooling liquid for the payload, or "Whoops, how did those fruit fly capsules get in there and accidentally drift over California?!…

The agitator was just transferring the volatile materials in the safest way possible. Safe non-flammable helium, low chance of collision compared to roadways or rail, material can't sink into the ocean triggering sanctions.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#466

Post by ihatepython »

esperent wrote: post #438
ziftface wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you be more specific? I'm from a country that people would consider part of "The West". However we've never attacked anyone except invaders in entire country's history. I'm sure you could dredge up some connection to the US and get angry with us about it, if you were an Islamic extremist or something. More realistically though, you could find fault with any country with that attitude. Speaking of current geopolit…

[flagged]

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#467

Post by shrimp_emoji »

oneoff786 wrote: post #151
akmarinov wrote: post #11

Have aliens invaded and we just don’t know about it, the government holding them off lowkey? Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...

People need to understand that if you’re being attacked by a FTL capable alien invader, you are so incredibly f**ed that it just does not matter. People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.

Anyone who's ever started pre-warp in a game of Distant Worlds: Universe[0] knows the hopelessness.

Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.

(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)

0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/261470/Distant_Worlds_Uni...

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#468

Post by tsimionescu »

bigcat12345678 wrote: post #448
localplume wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveillance satellites are very different to directly flying this equipment into US airspace, including the fact that this equipment could hold paylods other than ISR. Not to mention this comment implies China does not have equivalent spy satellites, which it does. Also the UN is an absolute joke. That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS. Also forge…

> China's [ASAT test]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengyun ) which has been the worst in history. Check your source, per your cited wiki page: > The shootdown, and the subsequent creation of a record-setting amount of in-orbit debris, drew serious international criticism.[15][16][17][18][19] The shootdown refers to the ASAT test on FY-1C For the reference [15] http://www.centerforspace.com/asat/ , cannot be opened,…

Reference 16 is cited because of the following paragraph:

> The single biggest debris-generating event happened in 2007, when China used a missile to destroy one of its own satellites. The explosion created more than 3,000 trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.

Also, comparing the BBC to Fox on coverage of anything is disingenuous at best. Even if they have clear biases, the BBC is one of the most respected news outlets in the world, and have been very rarely just lying about facts.

Edit: also, reference 15 includes an archive link, so the fact that it is currently unreachable is entirely irrelevant. Here is a sample from the archive link you misleadingly ignored:

> The official debris count from China’s anti-satellite missile test has reached 1,337 pieces big enough to be tracked and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office is estimating more than 35,000 pieces larger than 1 cm [...] This makes the January 11 test the largest debris-generating event in history, surpassing the previous record set in 1996, according to Dr. T.S. Kelso. Dr. Kelso serves as Senior Research Astrodynamicist in the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) and webmaster of CelesTrak, a site dedicated to tracking space objects and monitoring them for in-orbit collisions.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#469

Post by fit2rule »

King-Aaron wrote: post #297

So my thoughts: 1. Are we just seeing more of these things now, due to the US broadening the scope of their radar filtering, and there were always this number of things floating around and now they're just more aware of them? 2. Has something changed in the upper atmosphere/jet stream that's catching balloons that would have previously blown elsewhere, and are now going over the US by accident? 3. Is some really big…

[dead]

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#470

Post by perihelions »

morpheos137 wrote: post #401
mensetmanusman wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing what you can learn about capabilities from a picture. Apparently German scientists during ww2 used the diameter of the Hiroshima explosion from the newspapers to calculate the mass of uranium involved.

Hiroshima happened after Germany surrendered so I am curious what you mean. Certainly not nazi scientists.

Probably in this context,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon

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