The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response.
I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.
The American spy/military program involving Low Earth Orbit satellites is a potential target. SpaceX is launching tons of these satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
I know amateur's are involved in meteorology, aircraft tracking, even spotting asteroids and meteors. It would be awesome to have something pointing up all day with software on the back end — pinging you if a small object traverses its CCD.
The counter position is the idea that these have negligible benefit over satellites, so it is irrelevant. However, why send them if they don’t add new capabilities beyond satellites?
Can't balloons be punctured by something less expensive than a stinger? Maybe a drone with a machine gun?
And that leads to the conspiracy that there's someone already has a balloon defense system ready for the inevitable bid.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weather-balloon-canada-chin...
Who knows how many of the thousand rounds actually hit the thing.
I wonder if someone might start filling them with much cheaper hydrogen... what's the cost of all that helium anyway?
Goodyear blimp costs about $100k in helium.
Using guns against high-altitude balloons is also challenging just from an aerodynamics standpoint. Stall speeds get pretty high up around FL600 even with large wings, so the airplane would have to fly straight at the target with a high closure rate in order to get within effective gun range. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using a guided missile is much safer.
Modern incendiary and explosive rounds fired by fighter jets aren't effective against them becayse they are only triggered by their impact against a hard target, but I'm sure the DoD could come up with a more effective version pretty quickly if it came down to that.
Occam's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)
> when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires fewest assumptions
Occam's razor would say that this is the first time we've noticed a balloon over the US, so we shot it down. Believing that there is an unspoken agreement between the US and China to allow a certain amount of spying and we're only taking a hard stance because the Chinese fucked up and got their balloon noticed by civilians has far more assumptions baked into it.
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To be clear, I'm not saying the theory presented by OP is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not backed by Occam's Razor.
You must you believe spy balloons are [always, sometimes, never] reported to the press, and the press [always, sometimes, never] reports them to the public, and the public [always, sometimes, never] reads the reports.
These pieces are already in position.
Do you really think “you ought not to position pieces without necessity” really favors “always” over sometimes?
Likewise, there is evidence the air balloons fly over America more than the authorities recognize.
What explanation has the fewest unnecessary parts: we have perfect tranferreance of knowledge from Air Force Intelligence to consumers of the press, or the phenomena are witnessing are normal and expected?
Edit: I removed some parts I placed without necessity.
Another theory I heard is that they're poking the US to see what responses would be employed, how quickly detection happens, the radio signal / signals intelligence environment, etc.
Space is regarded similarly to international waters. Spy satellites are free to overfly countries.