U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

Post by ttul » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 4:15 AM UTC

remarkEon wrote: post #508

ttul wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by galangalalgol » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #555

ghostwriter wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the system is designed in a way that you have neither a say nor healthy representation America is the most powerful civilisation in the history of humanity. In almost every election, nonvoters could swing the outcome. On almost every issue, practically nobody reaches out to their representatives. Participation is hard. Many of us have more important matters to tend to. That’s fine. But don’t characterise participat…

Post by Salgat » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 4:21 AM UTC

mardifoufs wrote: post #477

Salgat wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major country has their faults, but the US definitely has a larger surface area for these faults as the only superpower left. On the other hand, as the only superpower left, we're fortunate the US exists as a stabilizing factor for world peace, rather than colonizing the rest of the world like every superpower before it.

Lol, yeah, those aren't just faults. Destabilizing the entire middle east isn't just an oopsie you can write off, it's what you call "stabilizing" usually looks like. Your discourse is basically what everyone thinks of their own superpower, as long as they aren't on the receiving end of those "faults".

Post by darkerside » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 4:22 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #548

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…

Judging from the videos that pan from the moon to the balloon: the balloon was about 3x smaller in the sky than the moon. Knowing the altitude of the balloon was 68,000 feet, we can fudge the distance from the observer to the balloon as 100,000 feet. Knowing the distance to the moon and the radius of the moon we can use like triangles to estimate that the balloon was ~285 feet across, +/- 20% for estimates. Edit: upd…

Post by DiggyJohnson » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 4:23 AM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #520

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…

Events like this are really destructive to my ability to be critically reflective of my ego. It’ll be months before I feel normal around the populace again.