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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

The trick is to shoot it down in a way it falls slowly so you can retrieve it and see what is in it, although, I suspect our intelligence agencies have a pretty good idea already.

I have no idea of course, but one thing I thought would be a Stingray, at that altitude you could intercept thousands of cell calls. I doubt that's what it is but the other thing is if it has any radio jamming capabilities or other things of offensive nature.

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I doubt it was to get a day of cell phone intercepts since it would be far easier and stealthier for China simply send a Stingray-type device to one of their thousands of industrial espionage agents already operating in the U.S. to drive it around in a van in whatever area and time period they are targeting. In fact, I suspect they (and others) already do that.

I think the purpose for sending the balloon was primarily to analyze the radar and RF environment on approach to U.S. airspace. The secondary purpose may have been as a test to see how and how quickly we would respond to the provocation.

We may not learn much from the wreckage as I suspect we'll find a lot of wide-band software defined radio gear which already uploaded its recorded data via satellite and wiped its software.

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 tracking a similar balloon over Latin America-- what they mean is they know this balloon was intended to follow a different route too.

I suspect Hanlon's razor is operational here. China uses those things off in international waters all the time, the fact that this one almost perfectly followed the jet stream seems to indicate it may have had a malfunction of its propulsion system and it drifted with the wind. When the US uses them in the China sea they have the advantage that if there is a malfunction it usually would drift safely West away from China.

The radar and RF on approach might make sense. I just don't see how a provocation test makes any sense though. It is hardly like America is not willing to use military force.

Really, a mistake on the part of China feels like the Occam's razor explanation to me.

It is just very hard to see the risk/reward calculation to do this intentionally with spy networks both on the ground and in space.

It would be fairly rudimentary (in context!) to fit such a device with sensors against certain intrusions (e.g. loss of balloon pressure) which would then trigger near-instant self destruction of electronics.

I would be quite surprised if such a high tech spy device did not have such contingencies as part of it's design.

And suspect it's probably one of the reasons why the risk of an overland shootdown wasn't taken - that is, there's no point risking collateral damage from falling debris, when you know the device will be programmed to wipe itself of most useful information upon being physically compromised.

True, although, evidence of offensive transmitters is difficult to completely destroy, heavy heat sinks and so forth. Simply erasing memory does not obliterate such clues.

I’ve seen some unconfirmed claims that they show it with a missile whose warhead fuse was disabled. Normally anti-aircraft missiles are proximity fused and throw out lots of fragments when they explode, kind of like a giant shotgun blast. With the warhead disabled presumably it just punctured the balloon to deflate it and, as you say, hopefully let it come down intact.

F-22s have a 20mm cannon, and they can operate at 65k feet. I don't know why they would need a disarmed missile just to poke a hole in it.

Perhaps the quantity of holes from an aircraft cannon is harder to control and less surgical than a single ground based missile?

Somehow I doubt wasted funds were at the top of the priority list (because intel is valuable, this whole incident has been a huge "WTF?" so far).

The official service ceiling of the F-22 is only 50,000 feet. There’s no doubt that it can fly higher (for example the F-15 set zoom climb records going up to nearly 100,000 ft) but at those altitudes controlling an aircraft gets a lot more difficult due to the thin air. If the F-22 _does_ have good control at those altitudes then using that capability for the shoot down would be revealing previously unknown (presumably classified) info about it. If it doesn’t, attempting a zoom climb close enough for a cannon shot would carry some risk… even if just risk of missing and having to try again while the whole world watches.

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