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Comment by ironyman | Hacker News Reader

I actually think it might just be a stray weather balloon. If they considered it a security threat they would've downed it before it reached continental US. Overall it's a fair resolution. It's a good political move to raise public awareness of tensions with the PRC (you'd be surprised how many people don't know). Downing it is mostly symbollic and completes the safety narrative.

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> I actually think it might just be a stray weather balloon.

Most experts seem to think that is unlikely because its payload was much larger than a weather balloon needs.

It's also got some sort of maneuvering system that you don't find on most weather balloons, or even on most non-weather high altitude balloons.

Generally, balloons either have no maneuverability at all, or they can go up and down. Since the wind often blows in different directions at different altitudes that gives the up and down ones some ability to control their course by going up or down to a layer going the right direction.

But in the winter in the US there isn't that much variation. Right now for example its blowing east from around 4000 ft to something like 70000 ft or more.

In the summer there is a lot more variation, so normally if you were trying to send a spy balloon over the US you'd want to do it in summer. Then you can use altitude changes to guide it or have it stay roughly over a target.

A huge maneuverable balloon in winter in the US is something special.

Surely it's not a very good spy balloon though if it can be observed from the ground with the naked eye ...

> Generally, balloons either have no maneuverability at all, or they can go up and down. Since the wind often blows in different directions at different altitudes that gives the up and down ones some ability to control their course by going up or down to a layer going the right direction.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the balloon was maneuvered by anything more than up and down control. But if you have a link I’d like to take a look? This is the best I could find so far:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo...

There is now a second one over Costa Rica. https://www.crhoy.com/mundo/un-segundo-globo-de-vigilancia-c...

I’m not in the defense industry neither know how the Chinese spy agency works but I guess there are more covert ways to spy than sending a 20ft ballon half way around the world.

One theory is that the Chinese know that. This could be them sending a message: "If you defend Taiwan, we can get over your heads cheaply and easily". The only casualties on the U.S. mainland during WW2 were Japanese balloons dropping bombs on the west coast. I doubt that symbolism was lost on the military or the Biden administration.

That can't be the message. You saw how easy it was to down the balloon.

It was easy to down one balloon during peace-time. You're right.

Please see my comment further below for why that might not work in aggregate during a real military conflict.

Edit: I'll paste it here in case it gets buried:

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 the U.S. population. I commented this above but I feel it's worth repeating here: the only casualties in the U.S. mainland during WW2 were Japanese balloons dropping bombs on the west coast[1].

I also wonder if this operation will end up backfiring. Suddenly, lots of people in the U.S. have Chinese aggression on their mind. Knowing Americans pretty well, I would expect this to actually increase public support for the defense of Taiwan. Inshallah.

1. https://amp.smh.com.au/world/north-america/when-japanese-bal...

I thought the whole thing was blown out of proportion and was almost certainly a weather balloon mistake, but I forgot about that WWII anecdote, and you are absolutely right. The odds of it actually being related to military just went up a lot in my calculations.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you just need a single plane with a machine gun on board to take down hundreds of these if you cared to take them down? And you can spot them far, far away and take them down far away from the coast, can't you?

I mean, they can't really do evasive maneuvers, they're not fast, they don't fight back, they're not armored, you wouldn't need super modern missiles.

It appears this particular balloon was traveling at 60000 feet altitude. The flight ceiling of an F-22 is 50000 (according to the internet, although the actual number is very likely classified). If that's correct, then shooting a balloon from 10000 feet below with a machine gun is not easy. Even if you put some holes in it, such a balloon is not going to simply pop like a party balloon. It very likely does not have a pressure differential between the inside and the outside, so the holes will simply allow the air to mix slowly (very slowly) with the lifting gas inside (hydrogen or helium). It will probably take days or weeks before the balloon goes down.

The effective range of the F-22's Vulcan Cannon is 2000 feet - That's where you expect about a quarter of the shots to hit... When you're talking about a fighter-jet sized target. The bullets will easily travel, still at kill velocity, well beyond that. I have no doubts that for a slow moving target such as a balloon, they can spray and pray, and pop it every time.

You might be right. On the other hand, today they used a missile. Such a missile costs about $200k, while a Vulcan round is under $20 (collectors can buy one round for $20, see [1], the military can probably buy in bulk for much less).

Maybe they just wanted to show off. But maybe it's just not that easy to take down a high flying balloon with unguided munitions.

[1] https://www.gunbroker.com/item/968543844

My understanding as a layman is that we cannot shoot objects at altitudes 60,000ft+ with machine guns. We need fighter jets equipped with specialized missiles, or ground-based SAMs, that are very expensive, and have some limitation on their range.

Meh, countermeasures for even lots of balloons are not difficult to imagine.

For lots of balloons way out of reach of fighter aircraft? What is there apart from expensive missiles that can operate at such altitudes?

Balloons carrying EMPs?

This came up my mind too. Have read that a high altitude EMP bomb would cause havoc on modern infrastructure.

Not sure about the details though. Hope someone knowledge can chime in.

“EMP” is mostly a Hollywood thing. Not that is entirely fabricated or anything, but it’s almost entirely popular science articles and action movies, very little real weapons systems, and the movies create a lot of misconceptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_warfare is the closest related thing.

What you would actually do is see if you could jam its comms, hit it with a laser (these exist as actual practical weapons these days), or engineer tiny high altitude anti aircraft missiles, either something that already exists or small mods to existing tech for the use case.

The US has done tons of research on high energy lasers to the point we had weapons that could target ICBMs. Now for anti-missile they weren't terribly practical, but for a large slow ballon its possible they could be. I've not found any research on lazing balloons, but I guess it exists out there somewhere.

How do quickly can those lasers be repositioned and fire? Couldn't China just launch a ton of these from many locations and let those disperse further, and make them extremely reflective in the relevant wavelengths? Also, not sure if a few small-ish holes would actually bring one of these down, they don't have a big pressure differential at altitude.

Then they're going to be shocked when they realize how satellites work

China has ICBMs with nuclear warheads. No one is confused about whether China has the ability to harm Americans on American soil.

No one is confused about the result of the use of nuclear weapons. Has Russia used them yet in their almost year-long war against Ukraine? Has the U.S.? Update your assumptions. All major powers are exploring how they might wage war short of nukes.

>All major powers are exploring how they might wage war short of nukes.

Certainly not with balloons.

The Chinese are a very innovative major power. Underestimate them at your own risk.

Yes but they are a major power because they have a large military and hundreds/thousands of strategic nuclear weapons. Not because they have some balloons.

That's what they want you to believe.

It’s odd to simultaneously say that nuclear weapons are irrelevant to the discussion and yet say that it would be an underestimate to expect that they probably wouldn’t rely on balloons.

Do you think a nuclear power could wage a conventional war against the U.S. on U.S. soil without it escalating very quickly to nuclear war? That would indeed be a significant update to my assumptions. Nothing about Russia and Ukraine has caused a similar update to my assumptions for the incredibly obvious reason that Ukraine is not a nuclear power.

I expected this to be some dude’s project that got blown out of proportion.

Thats why I am waiting in more info to come out and not jumping on the "evil Chinese spies" band wagon. It could be "evil chinese spies," but I also know there are communities like Ham Radio that people around the world have balloons they deploy.

And yea, the DoD said it may be. But I think the DoD is still looking for WMDs in Iraq.

There is report of another one across Costa Rica.

The balloon diameter was more like 40-60 meters.

20ft payload. Making this a very large system as far as high altitude balloons are concerned. The balloon is about the size of a football field

So that is how many desktop computers worth of processing power? Or how many cars worth of sensor equipment? What did they need so much space/weight carrying capacity for?

But not many ways are as cheap and close to the ground if you don't care about being found out.

Seems unlikely, considering the size of the payload and the presence of propellers to help it navigate.

Were the balloons from China transiting over Guam and Hawaii also blown of course? There are enough of these incidents for it to not seem like a coincidence.

Why is everything a narrative these days? That word comes up with ridiculous frequency.

Do we believe we are part of some kind of Truman show experiment?

As for it being a weather balloon, it seems they must be floating a lot of these balloons lately to check the 'weather'.

Yes, we are part of some kind of Truman show experiment. Every form of media you consume, which in aggregate forms much of your perception of the world at large and reality in general, is engineered to manipulate you with a narrative to serve someone's agenda, be that advertising, propaganda, psychological manipulation, addiction or manufactured consent.

This is true but has got absolutely nothing to do with whether the balloon is being used for spying or not.

Without first hand, primary sources of information, the media and their dissemination of information (or lack thereof) is a form of manipulation to suite someone's agenda, and has a lot of analogs with the truman show.

For example, nobody right now, except may be the US military, knows whether it's a real spy balloon, or really just a weather balloon. But the media reporting of it has framed it as a spy balloon with high probability.

Yes we can ignore the media because all the media is garbage, I agree on that. But I also believe that the the likelihood the balloon is being used for spying is probably pretty high.

>As for it being a weather balloon, it seems they must be floating a lot of these balloons lately to check the 'weather'

I have no idea what this balloon is, but know that thousands of weather balloons are released every day worldwide. That means China is likely releasing several hundred a day.

Weather balloons don't contain payloads the size is school buses. They fly up, pop and come down, the payload being around a kilogram or so.

F35 signature probe

It would have been hilarious if those turned out to be ADS-B receivers launched by plane tracking enthusiasts but AFAIK it's confirmed that those are with Chinese origin and I find it unlikely being benign because in that case the Chinese would have informed the US about these unlike they seek escalation.

I also find it fascinating that these balloons were not discovered sooner, reminds me of the stray soviet era military drone that flew half of the EU without detection to crash far away from Ukraine.

Maybe the world is not under complete surveillance just yet.

Is there any proof that it wasn't discovered earlier? It's difficult to prove a negative. It could have been discovered earlier but monitored differently and then when it became news, monitored overtly for different reasons.

If it isn't an immediate threat that you have to stop, why let an adversary know your capabilities (that you can detect them).

Well, these were reported by civilians over landlocked states and there's no indication that the balloons were spotted earlier.

The military is unlikely to report their surveillance activities to the media.

There was no overt indication that the balloons were spotted earlier.

Except the statements from Canada that are very suggestive.

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/20...

>there's no indication that the balloons were spotted earlier

No, the balloon was tracked when it entered Alaska on Jan 28 https://abc7news.com/where-the-chinese-surveillance-balloon-...

Thanks!

There was a thread on Twitter - which I didn't bookmark - which suggested there was a DoD statement that they'd tracked a number of these back at least as far as Trump's term.

And there were suggestions they might also have been used elsewhere, not just in the US/Canada.

As for what intel they could collect - a payload of that size would be equivalent to an airliner full of ELINT systems, rather like the US Rivet series. So that would include possible decryption of comms, and potentially precision mapping, analysis of traffic patterns, tests of local backdoor access, and so on.

Not all of that is easily done by satellite.

It is common for countries to not reveal that they have noticed something.

Revealing that you've noticed tells the enemy about your surveillance abilities.

I don't know about that, those were spotted by the civilians using not exactly high tech gears.

That doesn't meam that the military didn't spot it first but just didn't tell anyone.

Congrats to the military then for letting the Chinese conduct surveillance in order to conceal the fact that they have employees with eyes.

While being watched by the US military, thus giving it potentially valuable information on how China conducts its surveillance. It's turtles all the way down.

For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever. I guess it feeds from the need of knowing that someone(the correct one I guess?) is watching.

> For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever

Not for me at least. I never claimed the military did anything (discovered it, surveilled it), just that it's possible that they could have done something without others knowing.

I just think it's extremely bad form to assume things that there's no evidence for - both about the balloon and the military, and about why people are commenting.

A lot of things are possible, like maybe the God really put the fossils in the soil and the world is just a few thousand years old. That said, I usually like to have at least a clue about that being the case. Also, Occam's Razor.

I don't think we need to go off-topic and discuss theology here.

Regarding Occam's Razor, it's pretty simple that the military keeps secrets.

How did all the conspiracy theorists collectively forget how many spy satellites are in orbit? Were they flashy-thingied by the spy balloon, or do chem-trails (or the belief therein) cause amnesia?

Unless it flew over a secret research base I don't know what a balloon could gather that I can't already get from google maps or public USGIS datasets.

Signals intelligence

Like what? The radio waves traveling over the US are not a secret.

Think metadata, if you will. Where signals originated, how often and what times of day, etc.

It would be pretty absurd to believe the US military is not tracking every inch of its own air space.

What if its not actually feasible to do that? We have lot's of sensors and cameras everywhere, those would have been redundant if total surveillance was possible.

There are wide swaths of the US airspace that do not have strong radar coverage, certainly not at 80,000 feet.

Most of the ocean is unmonitored, too. Remember MH370? We lost it in the air and we couldn't find it in the ocean. :-)

I mean, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t, just that it was not worth revealing our ability to do so over one airliner crash where no one was likely to survive. They didn’t directly act on intelligence in enigma for the same reason either if memory serves. Tin foil hats are itchy…

If your argument is "MH370", it's a weak one. No one has radar coverage in the southern Indian Ocean because no one needs it.

There was an article about that very topic on HN just recently. It was not even remotely over US airspace, and the pilot had evidently threaded the needle through the radar coverage of several nations.

Umm, NORAD is able to track Santa - this balloon is much easier.

It’s most likely that this was observed and tracked by NORAD from the very beginning. The Pentagon had to publicly address it only when there were multiple reports by the public. There was little to be gained by publicizing it.

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