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U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

cnbc.com

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

#501

Post by clashmoore »

404mm wrote: post #382

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.

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

#502

Post by alanh »

ttul wrote: post #482
404mm wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they jammed it, considering how high it was. Intercepted .. I mean, China can use strong encryption too.

US military aircraft can remotely destroy electronics aboard other aircraft by aiming a highly focused beam precisely onto it, thus disabling it. They do t have to decrypt anything. They just have to fry it.

maybe but... it seems clear enough they did not do this given that it seems to have been piloted through a very nice high-value course across the US

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

#503

Post by akomtu »

scotty79 wrote: post #138

Why didn't they just down it safely harpooning it from a helicopter or something? Didn't they want to investigate the payload in detail rather than mangled remains? Was it really just a scientific baloon but US found it more useful to accuse Chinese of sending grotesquely large and not stealthy at all spy balloon? Otherwise why destroy it? EDIT: I stand corrected that USA just didn't have the technological capacity t…

Harpooning from a helicopter was one option, but it would be better to harpoon it from the ground or use a bigger balloon to capture this smaller balloon. Yet another possibility was to drop a sharp object on it from a satellite.

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

#504

Post by 404mm »

ttul wrote: post #486
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.

They would not be concerned about the electronics being damaged so much as recoverable so the components used can be analyzed and the supply chains traced. They want to know whether any export-restricted gear was used and, if so, who is to blame.

Don’t they already manufacture all our export restricted tech? /s

Jokes aside, I think the analysis will be more angled to proving or disproving the purpose, and identifying intelligence it gathered through some forensic analysis. If it dips into salty water, all circuit boards are immediately shorted. Seems a bit counter productive to me.

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

#506

Post by ghostwriter »

SergeAx wrote: post #483
pard68 wrote: post #338

I have been in "no politics, no news" mode for over a month. I try to do this about once a year. I have yet to tell my wife I do it, but when I am on this limited media consumption she always comments how pleasant I am to be around. I think it is a good thing for all of us to do once in a while, until 80 years ago most news was at best three or four days old, go back 120 years and you're getting only last weeks top t…

My favorite Russian joke of 2012 was this: — Daddy, which camp they are taking us to? — I don't know, son, I am not interested in politics.

It's one thing to be interested in politics, and a whole different story whether you can make a tiny bit of difference with the knowledge you get from spending time listening to all the politicians out there on a daily basis. Besides, most of the time the system is designed in a way that you have neither a say nor healthy representation of your political views in the elected government.

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

#507

Post by ianburrell »

chitowneats wrote: post #33
Kibae wrote: post #12

I wonder what the cost to take down the balloon was for the US (including monitoring it) vs. the cost of the balloon for China. If the ratio is something greater than 10:1, then I would say China got a pretty good ROI on a small investment.

I really do wonder if this is them testing that they can reliably and cheaply get high-altitude balloons to the U.S. mainland. In the event of a military conflict, I can imagine them swarming us with these. They must cost far, far less than the average American military aircraft. If our air power becomes partly tied up defending Taiwan, dropping bombs from craft like these might be an effective strategy to demoralize…

Balloon attack is a bad idea. Attacks don’t demoralize unless they are devastating. Devastating isn’t possible since US would threaten nukes. It also risks escalating the conflict and China mainland is more vulnerable. It would also get rid of any American uncertainty about defending Taiwan.

What matters isn’t the cost of fighter but cost of missile. The Sidewinder used was $400k. Unguided rockets might work and are super cheap. The US has a ton of fighter aircraft including Air National Guard that wouldn’t be sent overseas.

I suspect that balloons wouldn’t be that cheap. Similar NASA balloon cost $1 million. Since balloons are hard to steer, to be able to hit anything useful would require using guided glide bombs which are relatively cheap but not like dumb bombs. The cost is comparable to cruise missile.

Another problem is that it takes few days to week for balloons to cross the Pacific. Launch at start of war and it could be over by time arrive. Launch early and risk spoiling attack and maybe even causing war.

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

#508

Post by remarkEon »

ttul wrote: post #478
remarkEon wrote: post #466

Sidestepping the geopolitical issues with this for a moment ... What advantage is there to using a high altitude balloon for surveillance? I have to imagine there are some - like longer loiter time over a specific point, maybe better optics because you are still in atmosphere, it's obviously cheaper than launching a satellite - but I don't really know enough about this kind of hardware to say. Or maybe the point wasn…

One of the most technically challenging things about reconnaissance satellites is dealing with the high speed at which the satellite moves over the target. A balloon flies much lower and vastly more slowly. It can loiter over an area, sucking in electronic signals and taking photographs with extremely high fidelity. I don’t think the Chinese meant for this balloon to cross the United States. I believe they were testi…

Did they actually apologize? I thought all they said is that it was a weather balloon. Regardless, I'm very interested in what hardware was actually on this thing. Hopefully the public gets a summary of what USN pulls up during recovery.

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

#509

Post by sandworm101 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #171
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…

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…

When an aircraft doesnt have a transponder, doesnt respond to radio calls, no flight plan on file, and seems to be adrift, it is a hazard to navigation irrespective of altitide. Such things get intercepted and, if in any way dangerous, are shot down. Post-9/11, there are even protocols for shooting down unresponsive airliners.

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

#510

Post by icelancer »

SN76477 wrote: post #375
pard68 wrote: post #338

I have been in "no politics, no news" mode for over a month. I try to do this about once a year. I have yet to tell my wife I do it, but when I am on this limited media consumption she always comments how pleasant I am to be around. I think it is a good thing for all of us to do once in a while, until 80 years ago most news was at best three or four days old, go back 120 years and you're getting only last weeks top t…

I ignore the majority of it myself. Maybe I'm a pessimist but there is little I can do to make an impact on geopolitics. I want to spend my energy on the things I can control and little energy on anything else. I'm much happier being completely unaware of whatever may be happening with the world.

>> Maybe I'm a pessimist but there is little I can do to make an impact on geopolitics.

Ironically:

>> I want to spend my energy on the things I can control and little energy on anything else.

You'll make a bigger impact on geopolitics by doing this than ten people who incessantly post on social media about Ukraine, #MeToo, and spy balloons ever will.

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