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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

#891

Post by mlindner »

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…

The one advantage it really has over satellites is how long it can stay on station and still be relatively near to the target. I'd personally guess it's a signals intelligence platform rather than anything telescopic.

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

#892

Post by mlindner »

jacquesm wrote: post #617
snickerbockers wrote: post #282

Im pretty impressed that it made it all the way across the continent in a couple days, i had no idea high altitude balloons could move that fast.

The jetstream is fast enough that it factors into any flight at altitude when it comes to fuel estimations and path calculations, up to 12% difference or so iirc.

Indeed this is really obvious to anyone who regularly travels to California and back to the somewhere on the eastern half of the US (or vice versa). The time it takes for the east bound leg is way faster than the west bound leg. Going from San Francisco to Detroit for example is about an hour faster on the east bound direction.

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

#893

Post by angry_octet »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #698
angry_octet wrote: post #605

How incredibly dumb. Imagine all the delicious ELINT that balloon relayed about the APG-81 RADAR and the missile, which assuredly coat much more than the balloon drone.

I presume they had the ability to detect which bands this thing was transmitting on, entirely disable it with some sort of electronic warfare thingy, and then get close enough to shoot

Difficult to jam what hasn't be observed before. If it used something spread spectrum you would have to have a very powerful noise jammer to saturate the satellite receiver, which would have to be precisely located.

The short timeline from "we're not going to shoot this down" to "we shot it down" leads me to believe no in depth analysis occurred. But of course previous balloons may have been observed and even interdicted and we wouldn't necessarily know.

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

#894

Post by vegasea »

telmo wrote: post #864
vegasea wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is real football? I've heard of association football (shortened to soccer by the British), rugby football, Australian rules football, American football and Canadian football but I've never heard of real football.

And which one of those do you figure "real football" refers to? Can you take a wild guess? It's like saying "the real Albert Einstein", as opposed to good Albert Einstein the baker, who is a local celebrity because of his amazing Apfelstrudel. I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.

I was wondering if there was perhaps another variant of football that I had not heard of called "real football" since there are so many different types. So if real football simply refers to football then why did the OP ask: "Which football? Real football or American football?" if it's apparently so obvious?

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

#895

Post by darkerside »

petemir wrote: post #839
darkerside wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size of a football field, got it

Which football? Real football or American football?

It's funny because I'm a fan of football -- I'll let you decide which I might be talking about -- and the field is about the same size in either case.

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

#896

Post by tushar-r »

pifm_guy wrote: post #847
vineyardmike wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has great radar capabilities, so we obvious knew it was there. I think that raises the question of why we didn't shoot it down. Maybe we were curious where it was going and we wanted to see how capable at navigating it was? Is it too dangerous to shoot down over land? What was the diplomatic communication with the Chinese? There's many questions that may never be answered in public. It seems more than likely t…

Remember that Loon, the USA Google balloon project, sent similar balloons around the world, including over China. They didn't shoot our balloons down.

Pretty certain they did not. China controls the Internet a little too seriously and has banned Google for many years to allow them to fly Loon balloons beaming free internet to their population.

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

#897

Post by mactunes »

misja111 wrote: post #878
ipqk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at.

I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.

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

#898

Post by pifm_guy »

tushar-r wrote: post #896
pifm_guy wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Loon, the USA Google balloon project, sent similar balloons around the world, including over China. They didn't shoot our balloons down.

Pretty certain they did not. China controls the Internet a little too seriously and has banned Google for many years to allow them to fly Loon balloons beaming free internet to their population.

They didn't give permission for the internet service to launch there. But they did give overflight permission.

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

#899

Post by unity1001 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #309
LarryMullins wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America voted for a president who said he would, but then reneged on that promise. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/31/obama-... Fuck you Obama!

…either that, or he got into office, saw some actual intelligence and realized his utopian views were not grounded in reality. Then he did the responsible thing and didn’t keep an unethical promise. I didn’t really care for Obama but he did the right thing on that item, in my opinion.

[flagged]

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

#900

Post by torpfactory »

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 create better ways to jam or avoid US missiles. Sending it over sensitive sites may have been an attempt to force the US to take such action.

I’ve heard rumors that it was shot down by an AIM 9X, which is IR guided, a good choice as its seeker doesn’t use radar and thereby expose the terminal radar guidance information. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and theorize the delay was due to brand new upgrades required to the AIM 9X software to be able to lock on to and hit a balloon, which they probably were not originally capable of.

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