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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

So they waited until the balloon was over sea.

This raises the question: why didn't the military see it coming and destroy it before it crossed the border?

I posted this link earlier but it was tracked. Here is a flight path of Canadian fighters checking the balloon out as it crossed towards Montana. https://twitter.com/steffanwatkins/status/162136299808111001...

The link was in this longer, and good article: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-spy-balloon-ove...

Oh wow, that's messed up. Kind of irritating to see the thing was being closely tracked all through BC and just... nothing? Nice...

Maybe they weren't sure at that point that it was unmanned? Shooting it down would have been a whole different story then

I mean we only know what we know so far. I admittedly haven't followed this really closely but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gamble that the public wouldn't notice it. Or maybe it was incompetence or indecision.

It was surprising how this balloon spread through the public consciousnesses, kinda like the balloon boy hoax I suppose.

Yeah, we have no real vision into the actual facts, only what gets told to the public, so it's tough to judge. I can imagine it not even being a surveillance balloon at all (though it probably is). I'm always skeptical around stuff like this, haha

CF18 seem to have a service ceiling of 15km. This thing was about 20km high. Could they shoot it if they wanted?

Man, I don't know. I'm still effectively a kid who thinks planes are cool but never got too into the specs. There was a a satellite shot down by an F-15 so maybe there was a rough plan if the balloon seemed like a big deal? Or the service ceiling is conservative and downgraded? https://avgeekery.com/that-time-an-f-15-pilot-shot-down-a-sa...

I was reading about the choice of missile used for shooting it down uses lasers for the fuse instead of radar which might have had issues with the balloon depending on the material. Also this seems be the first F22 kill.

Yes, if they had standard medium range missiles like the AMRAAM.

But can missiles hit a balloon? I assumed they were designed to target large hot metallic objects.

This isn't the first balloon with equipment on it that has overflown US territory (which should also put to rest the 'rogue weather balloon' theory). China has been doing this ever since Trump started levying import taxes on Chinese goods. This particular balloon was brazen enough to be loitering over military targets for some time. It makes sense to do a shoot down over the ocean so you can have a better chance to recover the payload for analysis.

Since you appear to believe this balloon had a surveillance mission, please explain what data it could conceivably have collected that isn't much easier to collect some other way. The military targets over which you suggest this aircraft intentionally loitered do not even have restricted airspaces. Anyone could get in a plane and fly right over them at whatever altitude they choose and nobody would even notice. You can fly circles over Malmstrom AFB until you run out of fuel, if you want.

SIGINT, ELINT, and MASINT. Putting a bunch of radars on a balloon platform is relatively cheap, much cheaper than a satellite. It's also got better plausible deniability than a similarly equipped airplane.

Ground penetrating radar over military bases can yield useful intelligence. So can gauging the response times and radio characteristics of air defense radars. Then there's good ol' photo reconnaissance. Such a huge platform could easily have stabilized mounts for high resolution cameras. Being an order of magnitude closer to the targets makes for better photos.

I think it would be considered illegal espionage if someone working for the PLA rented a plane and flew it over military bases. Balloons have more plausible deniability and less personal risk.

The most likely scenario is the network surveillance. The defense dept has already confirmed the balloon was carrying surveillance equipment. I think the real point here was to probe the US response.

I wonder...is there any value to:

- IDing components, maybe even using some x-ray tech like US satellites have

- Developing an idea of what this thing vacuums up, informationally

- Switching our monitoring posture to also vacuuming up the same as it travels along, as if we are co-spying on our own stuff

- Using the information product to help harden any sensitive information that was vacuumed, for counter-intel purposes

This would fit the general parameters of what the public saw happening (almost nothing, then bang as soon as the balloon is floating over literally nothing).

If its anything like the cold war where we did this with the Russkies (and prior to that, The Nazis) it makes sense to me it would have significant electronic warfare value.

Because it wasn't a political kerfuffle then and they weren't gonna be the ones to make it into one.

they claimed they started tracking it over the Pacific even, my guess is we just don’t have the full story, perhaps they didn’t want to fail at shooting it down quickly, succeed at responding the “real” way and give something away, or spring some other “trap card”, or it’s all a lie and was our own thing that got away or just a distraction and everything after that was reactionary and opportunistic, we may never know

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