Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
More details: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starshield_(satellite_constellati...
Idk how many companies/govs have this capability but: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/
CubeSats are cheap and effective.
Because to achieve that you need to put a lot of stuff in orbit and the only way to affordably do that is cheap (reusable) launches.
They did what now?
From the first paragraph or two of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
> In August 2001, Musk shared a plenary talk with Mike Griffin at the fourth Mars Society convention where he announced his plans to send his greenhouse to Mars.[6] In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished Dnepr ICBMs that could send the envisioned payloads into space.[7]
In fact, setting up as much automation as possible, pre-people, would be a good way to establish the human safety of Mars flights.
As well as supercharging the productivity and quality of life of the first Marsers when they finally do arrive.
But for your question, with LEO satellites you don't really target specific countries. They cover every country within a given latitude range. A round LEO orbit that goes over the US must also go over China.
However you don't need geostationary orbits to target a given part of the globe. Molniya orbits do the same thing more or less and work better if you want coverage further away from the equator. They were popularized by the USSR and the US and China use them to varying extents.
I wouldn't expect to see spy satellites from the SDA; the NRO has always controlled those. I could believe small spy satellites if launched from NRO. There haven't been any details on how missile defense will work from space with small satellites. The descriptions I've seen have been about communication and detecting hypersonic weapons with infrared sensors. The latter is not what I would think of as spy satellite or missile defense.
The US government knows exactly what is going on up there at all times and most likely has the most advanced spying satellites and capabilities out of all countries.
The NRO has been doing this since the 60s!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office
>In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope.
I had a retired intel guy at DEFCON tell me the imagery is so advanced they could zoom in on a coin on the ground and tell if it was heads or tails.
Assuming a great number of things, a larger than Hubble 3 meter aperture, 200km orbit, red 750nm light, zero atmospheric distortion, the resolving power cannot be better than 6.1 centimeter resolution.
tan(750e-9/31.22)200000
= 0.061
If you want the best possible example of NRO's capabilities, the best example in recent memory is when trump unintentionally disclosed them with the highest resolution satellite image I personally have ever seen [2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/05/758038714/can-president-trump...
Some hardware failure happens, but it's not that frequent, if it's like previous generations of cell technology, most of it will run until the operator chooses to shut down that particular service e.g. switching to a newer generation and freeing up the spectrum for it.
Or was it a joke I'm not American enough to understand?
US can always launch more and for these LEO constellations it's all about numbers.
2. These gaps would be measured in minutes, and are zero when you considered the combined coverage of all none-nato countries. Anything that we don't want seen is done under cover.
1. Some reports say that they've only been detected recently; referencing multiple undetected occurrences during the Trump presidency; o they've been working for X years already. If they're undetected, they can view into gaps referenced above. If this program has been going on for 5-10 years undetected then it still could have been of value to China/Russia/Whoever owns them.
China has a total of 600-ish satellites together for all purposes. Starlink has 3500-ish right now, and the already licensed plans are for 12000 by 2026. When(if!) Starship starts launching satellites, a single launch can put in orbit more military satellites than China has ever launched, and it does not seem have a comparable capability in the near future.
Like knowing what kinds of alloys turned out not to work and why, etc. So you don't have to repeat all that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00048-7#:~:text=1.....
If they wanted low key interception of civilian terrestrial radio signals, seems like it would be better to just rent a Uhaul or RV, load it up with radio gear, and drive it across the country.
UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example:
"Consider a small sample of heinous cases: in April 2016 Foreign Policy reported that, in the Central African Republic, a French commander tied up four girls and forced them to have sex with a dog. Soldiers from France, Gabon, and Burundi sexually abused at least 108 women and children in a single province. In July 2015, The Washington Post reported that peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with over 229 women and girls in exchange for food, medicine, or other necessities.
"Most recently, it was published in the The Washington Post in February 2016 that ‘four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as young as 13 as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex in a different camp for the internally displaced’ and ‘as many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomised six boys ages nine to 15’."
https://www.ibanet.org/article/CEBC5F69-A238-49BB-B85A-5E8D8...
I'm guessing if one lived in any of the areas mentioned above, the UN would feel about as much like an invading force as just about anything.
The UN as a peacekeeping force was a great concept, but it's had a very mixed history when put into practice.
But it exists, so many people expect it to be a solution to their problems.
First, I don't think calling them "blue helmets" has the negative connotation you think it does.
Second. What's the difference between the UN peacekeepers and any other army? All have a mixed history and I'm pretty sure have let's say a high amount of immunity.
People do bad things, especially soldiers who have power and the cover of war. This will never change. Of course crimes should be prosecuted as well but I don't know much about the details of the UN peacekeepers.
Their Rules of Engagement are also significantly different from those of a conventional military force.
The International Court of Justice (the IJC–not the ICC) is part of the United Nations System. At that body, at least, UN peacekeepers enjoy blanket immunity. To oversimplify it, it's another case of, "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
The UN nominally expects host countries to prosecute the war crimes of their peacekeepers, but in reality the nature of deploying to somewhere needing peacekeepers is that the rule of law on the ground is already minimal, at best. So there's no real enforcement mechanism to prosecute these crimes.
It is not a trivial distinction. One can debate their virtue and utility value one way or the other, but the distinction is real and significant. They operate under a unique set of circumstances and saying war is hell and victors typically enjoy their own brand of immunity is true enough, but not entirely applicable here.
The legal framework surrounding UN peacekeeping is insufficient as the UN itself grants its peacekeepers blanket immunity, and expects host and/or contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by UN peacekeepers. But those nations are almost by definition unable to maintain the rule of law (or in the case of contributing nations, unlikely or unwilling to prosecute).
I'm not sure why "but other people also do bad stuff" is where everyone seems to go with that information. But to go along it, a more apt comparison would be the Mahmudiyah rape and killings: war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq, in which the perpetrators were tried, convicted and sentenced in American military and civilian courts. That's how that aspect of the inevitable evils of war should be handled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
Had the perpetrators been UN peacekeepers, the host nation likely would not have had the ability to prosecute the accused competently and fairly, and the UN would have given them immunity if expected to act. The contributing nation would not have wanted to prosecute for a whole host of reasons.
One can argue that the UN is doing what it can, but it isn't much: Asking contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by their citizens (not likely), shaming those nations [1], and trying to support the victims [2]. Which all goes to show that the UN is rather toothless on the matter. There's an asymmetry to their ability to contribute to violence but not prosecute the criminal abuses thereof. I think that's concerning.
Regardless, your comparison reminds me that even Abu Ghraib resulted in numerous prison terms. Make of that what you will.
Since this is HN I might as well provide the data:
In total 11 soldiers were convicted, of which 9 served time in prison:
- Former Spc. Armin Cruz - 8 months
- Former Sgt. Javal Davis - 6 months
- Pfc. Lynndie England - 3 years (released after 1 year and 5 months)
- Former Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick - 8½ years (released on parole after 4 years)
- Former Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. - 10 years (paroled after 6 and a half years)
- Former Spc. Sabrina Harman - 6 months
- Former Spc. Roman Krol - 10 months
- Former Spc. Jeremy Sivits - 1 year
- Former Sgt. Michael J. Smith - 179 days
And the two who served no prison time were:
- Former Sgt. Santos A. Cardona - 90 days of hard labor
- Former Spc. Megan Ambuhl Graner - Discharged from the army without prison time
We all know US will declare war on Belgium IIRC if international court of justice will ever sentence any US soldier, all pretty unique scenarios.
Blue helmets may not all be saints, but they did and do some important security work in semi-failed states ie in Africa where otherwise gangs would chop civilians from other tribes if left unchecked. Also kept Balcan states more stable after war. You are simply choosing to not see forest for the trees for whatever personal reasons.
The vast majority of the damage done by a war is not in massacres, or isolated incidents, but rather in the normal practice of warfare: attacks upon infrastructure, collateral damage, blockades and sanctions. These are the drivers that send life expectancy plummeting, and the idea that you can 'clean' war by avoiding some forms of violence, generally selected for symbolic reasons, is absurd.
So in the case of the UN, the reason why it's a good model is that the UN is unlikely to engage in wars of aggression, so even if the conduct of its soldiers are awful, they are ultimately less problematic than a national military.
Even the Nosiour square massacre in 2007, which was a particularly atrocious, and not conducted by a military personnel, took a whole year to file charges (despite overwhelming evidence) found five Blackwater soldiers guilty, but had the charges dropped on technicality in 2009 (despite taking a whole year in preparing the charges). Now later rulings found this was an error, and four of them were finally charged with the massacre 2014 (seven years after the massacre). Charges were as such:
- Dustin Heard - 12½ years in prison
- Evan Liberty - 14 years in prison
- Nicholas Slatten - Life without the possibility of parole
- Paul Slough - 15 years in prison
Additionally Jeremy Ridgeway got 1 year and 1 day in prison in a special deal by pleading guilty and testifying against the other.
Predictably all four (not Ridgeway) were then pardoned by Trump in 2020.
This is a clear case of the US justice system not actually wanting to press these charges, and only did so reluctantly after an immense pressure from the electorate.
If you also compare the Nisour Square Massacre to the helicopter murders of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh (as leaked by Chelsea Manning). The only people that answered for those murders were Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, and that was only for revealing the truth about those murders.
Nuclear powers play by whatever rules they choose to play by.
In fairness to the UN, it's not an easy problem to solve: who's going to volunteer to act as a peacekeeper in a place where if the wrong faction ultimately prevails, you will be subject to the local jurisdiction and all of the corruption that may entail? Unlike military service, UN peacekeepers do not have the same degree of national backing to rely on when things go south.
The original point to which I was replying is that they don't understand why people call on a mere forum to solve their problems. Some regions repeatedly look to UN peacekeepers to solve their problems and so the forum designation is insufficient to describe it.
But the UN is oddly violent for a mere forum, some would say immorally so. War crimes are as old as war, but war is war. The UN is this bizarrely unaccountable keeper of peace and rape. And many people really don't understand the UN's modest peacekeeping capabilities and the collateral damage they often bring to a conflict, and often wrongly believe the UN is a silver bullet when it's far from it. I believe that's why people repeatedly think the UN is a solution to problems it mostly isn't.
That's the scope of what I was trying to address. My added detail about its structural and fundamental flaw of having no real mechanism for recourse when its troops commit war crimes was just to properly frame what an inherently deficient entity it really is.
Maybe it depends if you're a UN member with a veto or not. It's possible that having a veto changes how one would perceive and interact with the UN.
I can cite henious cases committed by London Police force. Just a couple months ago we've convicted 'bastard dave'. He was a cop and used his position to become a serial rapist and a murderer, and he had a nickname, which strongly suggests some of his colleagues knew something.
You have to assess three points to understand if the entire organisation is responsoble.
Have they commited significantly more warcrimes, than comparable situation suggests is, dreadfull to say, normal? Say during occupation of Iraq? For blue helmets I mean, I hope London police do not think of themselves that way.
Can these acts be traced back to some higher level of command, that is either turning a blind eye or is actively encouraging them?
When these acts become known, are the perpetrators punished, or are these acts tolerated?
I have not studied history of blue helmets, but these are the kind of questions you should be seeking to answer.
The rest is a different conversation.
That's atrocious
I used to be in the 82nd Airborne and the inevitable problems when they got sent on peacekeeping missions in the 90s was no big surprise at all.
While it was a particularly poor showing for a UN mission, and badly handled at every possible level, I don't think it's comparable raping children. It wasn't the UN soldiers who murdered the civilians, they were just completely unable to prevent it, and provided only an illusion of defense.
If anything, the doves are way to often the pets of the butcher.
The UN courts can issue judgements…
Human Rights Courts: e.g. Slobodan Milosovic, Radavan Kardzich etc
A lot of the global treaties are kicked around there
They also enforce peace zones (poorly) like Lebanon, Israel demilitarised zone.
They coordinate aid programs UNRWA etc
UN decisions are more like a veil or facade of moral Authority
Ignorant, cynical claims on the the Internet do a lot of harm to real people, by tearing down valuable things that people need.
Not so; "veil" or "facade" implies fakeness or concealment. The U.N. does not hide its mission or its position on human rights.
> One of the great achievements of the United Nations is the creation of a comprehensive body of human rights law—a universal and internationally protected code to which all nations can subscribe and all people aspire. The United Nations has defined a broad range of internationally accepted rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It has also established mechanisms to promote and protect these rights and to assist states in carrying out their responsibilities. [1]
The lack of consensus and consistency is an ongoing challenge, sure, but it doesn't make the goals fake. Countries are flawed and have competing interests, but it is important to nudge the world in a better direction.
It's all to appease the major powers to not use their nukes.
To a degree, it also gives the lesser players a voice to feel heard so that they continue to participate in the economic system that benefits the big players. Again, this keeps the big players from acting unilaterally, imperialistically, etc. in a way that threatens the use of nukes.
A side benefit is that this lets the bigger players test their geopolitical strategies without dangerous surprises. If tensions can be expressed and gently eased into a final state, that prevents a flash bang.
It's kept us from having another world war. Or nuclear exchange. Here's hoping we keep it up.
"Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2)
"The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9)
"Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19)
More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding.
I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design.
[Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.]
That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.
It's worth thinking about this context when considering the Korean War when it was UNC (UN Command) that was the primary defense force: https://www.unc.mil/History/1950-1953-Korean-War-Active-Conf...
I think it is maybe only after the Iraq War that people stopped thinking of the UN as an alternative to conventional war politics. IIRC, Bush acted unilaterally without UN approval, and now it kinda seems like the "you should get UN approval before making war" norm has been lost? I don't remember anyone even discussing the possibility of UN approval for any more recent US military actions like in Libya. And the UN hasn't played a large role in Ukraine either -- I suppose that might be because Russia is on the security council?
Article 43 of the UN Charter would, if it were ever implemented, create a military force under the control of the UN Security Council.
>The potential of the United Nations and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to protect member states "against violators of the peace." Chapter VII dealt with enforcement action: Article 39 first authorized the Security Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression"; Article 42 was designed to respond with "air, sea or land forces as may be necessary"; and Article 43 committed all UN member states "to make available to the Security Council, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security." Although much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA514849456&sid=sitemap...
The UN also handles much more than military missions, including health, technical coordination, and much more.
A balloon could also be in the way for airplanes. A balloon could also drop its payload, on purpose or by accident. The recent balloons have been reported to carry a load the size of up to several buses so I guess if that falls to ground it could cause quite some damage.
Not sure satellites can shoot missiles or drop bombs that could hit earth in any effective manner.
Otherwise (for example) the Apollo missions would have violated USSR's airspace whenever the moon's orbit was above it's territory, which would make space unusable for everyone.
So yes, Ballons are by definition in airspace because they use lighter than air buoyancy to rise and sattelites do not.
Check your source, per your cited wiki page: > The shootdown, and the subsequent creation of a record-setting amount of in-orbit debris, drew serious international criticism.[15][16][17][18][19]
The shootdown refers to the ASAT test on FY-1C
For the reference [15] http://www.centerforspace.com/asat/, cannot be opened, the site is unreachable.
For [16] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17497766 It's referring to a debris from Russia rocket, itself is a routine affair in the space. > The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took refuge in escape capsules as a piece of space junk hurtled by. > The debris - a discarded piece of Russian rocket - was detected on Friday when it was too late to move the ISS.
For reference [17], a piece from BCC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6276543.stm BCC's reporting on China is about as accurate as Fox's reporting on Democratic party. Go figure
For reference [18], an intro page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse AFP Not sure what's relevance with a ASAT
For reference [19], https://www.npr.org/2007/01/19/6923805/chinese-missile-destr... > The governments of Britain, Japan and Australia are voicing concern over China's apparent test of an anti-satellite missile. The United States says China shot down one of its own aging weather satellites last week, in a kind of target practice in low Earth orbit. > "I was surprised that they were able to do it," Kristensen says. Seems about routine as any space tests...
Then the conclusion is that China's ASAT test is "the worst in history." With evidences that are as substantial as web3's value to society.
This type of post on HN is simply not passing the quality bar on HN...
> The single biggest debris-generating event happened in 2007, when China used a missile to destroy one of its own satellites. The explosion created more than 3,000 trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.
Also, comparing the BBC to Fox on coverage of anything is disingenuous at best. Even if they have clear biases, the BBC is one of the most respected news outlets in the world, and have been very rarely just lying about facts.
Edit: also, reference 15 includes an archive link, so the fact that it is currently unreachable is entirely irrelevant. Here is a sample from the archive link you misleadingly ignored:
> The official debris count from China’s anti-satellite missile test has reached 1,337 pieces big enough to be tracked and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office is estimating more than 35,000 pieces larger than 1 cm [...] This makes the January 11 test the largest debris-generating event in history, surpassing the previous record set in 1996, according to Dr. T.S. Kelso. Dr. Kelso serves as Senior Research Astrodynamicist in the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) and webmaster of CelesTrak, a site dedicated to tracking space objects and monitoring them for in-orbit collisions.
Are your brain's logical circuit working correctly?
Right, that's why we should only ever trust Radio Free Asia for our news sources about what's happening internationally
Here is the submitted flight plan https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
https://x.company/projects/loon/
Rather than being all secretive, it would be just as easy to blame some new upstart company being a little more cavalier than Google.
https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162414986417840128...
Also that we are seeing a lot more now because we have turned down/off the filters on the radars. Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives.
https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162461466198661120...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23733/spacex-exec-says...
Perhaps we can, but clearly we can expect to find actual UAVs corresponding to these radar signals.
If these UAVs that have been shot down were domestic research balloons or some other aircraft exempt from FAA regulation, then we can expect a party to come forward and publicly acknowledge ownership/control of the UAV.
However, based on the descriptions of the object over Alaska it seems very likely there are indeed unmanned drones being operated by foreign governments and not domestic weather/research balloons or FAA compliant unregistered domestic aircraft.
Keep in mind that not only US or Canada launches weather balloons. These things are well capable of flying huge distances, including across the oceans. There has been one launched by amateur radio operators a few years ago that has circumnavigated the globe - and that's not at all a rare feat.
See e.g.:
https://qrp-labs.com/circumnavigators.html
So no need to go all conspirationalist about "unmanned drones operated by foreign governments" just yet. Especially given the distances and altitudes these things were found flying at - a heavier than air device would need a ton of fuel and energy to fly that high and that far, so a "drone" that at the same time doesn't look like an aircraft is rather unlikely.
It is not a tinfoil hat theory to point out that a balloon that is not playing by weather balloon rules is not a weather balloon. Route planning hasn't suddenly gotten more difficult in the past week.
The only new aspect is that you are being told about it. Which is unfortunately probably not a good sign. At best it will be only used to justify the purchase of some expensive "hi tech" boondoggle to counter these... balloons.
This may be true, but it's awful hard to get visual confirmation and then shoot down a false positive.
This whole thing is just genius on so many levels. Exploit the stigma about aliens by constructing small drones and make them appear wacky beyond belief to guarantee they'll go unreported. Exploit the radar filters for small and slow moving craft with motionless soft balloons. And it worked brilliantly.
> I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves. Their lack of imagination, curiosity, and creativity appears to have built a near-perfect vacuum that our enemies could exploit and likely have exploited to an astonishing degree.
That's easy to say, but does anyone know how many objects appear when you drop the filter? Yes, the military has a huge budget, but it's not unlimited. My guess is when you lower the filter you're met with so many objects that you couldn't possibly address them all with the resources you have available.
Imagine you have 10 resources to deploy and a screen with 100 objects to investigate. You lower the filter and there are now a million objects to investigate. It's not hard to understand why the filters were in place and saying they were "asleep" is silly. There have probably been people at the DoD asking for more resources ($) to remove the filters for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_balloon
>Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily.
On the other hand, weather balloons are not silver-gray and cylindrical. A Google image search shows them almost always white and spherical to teardrop shape and pretty much unmistakably a balloon.
Not to say one of these can't be a weather balloon, but I would expect these also are known possibilities / somewhat detectable / aren't trying to be sneaky ...
We did a balloon launch a long time ago, it had a radio sending back telemetry and we chased it across Colorado scrub land hundreds of miles.
https://www.overlookhorizon.com/how-to-launch-weather-balloo...
Wooden and fiberglass boats are fairly invisible to radar, even with metal masts and rigging. If you are ever planning to head out into the ocean and near where you might expect commercial shipping, these are a cheap safety item for making your boat visible.
It is now 8 years since I worked with it last time and 1000m2 sounds very large to me but that is the only number that pops into my head.
So yes, if you are in a small boat, use a radar reflector and also be alert.
Not required in the US, but not a bad idea to hoist one in fog.
Although these days, an AIS transmitter is a better answer. But a prudent mariner never trusts a single point of failure, so might as well do both.
Admittedly I don't always hoist the radar reflector in the heavy fog near the Golden Gate bridge, but I always transmit AIS in low visibility (and monitor it).
So it is possible that trigger-happy NORAD is shooting down a lot of perfectly harmless stuff now.
There are large scientific balloons. I couldn't find any standards of large balloons using transponders. They have communications and tracking so location is known. I wonder if NORAD is in contact with all the organizations about their balloons.
I suspect there will be move to put ADS-B on larger balloons.
Are the electronics in these balloons recovered eventually? Or is it just basically e-waste?
Not only did our balloon have the parachute and radar reflector, we also put blinking lights on it. Since there was no transmitter on it, I had to call 2 different phone numbers to give status updates to report anticipated altitude progress. The first was the regional airport, and the second number was the larger airport 2 hours away that we were in the line of their approach pattern. The first airport would then notify the closer joint air base that they did not feel like we needed to call directly. At one point, we lost contact with our cheap GPS because it reached altitudes beyond what the company anticipated civilians to be doing. ATC informed us they were tracking it, and we were a little off in our altitude estimates within 5000'.
All of that to say, no, it was not e-waste. we got it all back minus the bits of the balloon that exploded into pieces no longer attached.
[0]https://www.stratoflights.com/en/tutorial/weather-balloon-to...
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/drones-may-replace-wea...
1. Are we just seeing more of these things now, due to the US broadening the scope of their radar filtering, and there were always this number of things floating around and now they're just more aware of them?
2. Has something changed in the upper atmosphere/jet stream that's catching balloons that would have previously blown elsewhere, and are now going over the US by accident?
3. Is some really big budget scifi coming out soon, and some marketing team thought that after the chinese balloon thing, launching a ton of cheap weather balloons painted silver would be a cool guerrilla marketing campaign for it?
It could be for a couple different reasons and/or a combination of them, but included in those are probably things like distraction from the lies, failure, and collapse in Ukraine or even the “OMG, it’s UFOs” now is to prevent that huge toxic chemical catastrophe in Ohio taking peoples attention. But maybe it’s even just priming people for the minutes of hate to initiate Oceana’s war with Eurasia that we have always been in.
The social engineers in the government constantly misdirect and redirect attention by using their patsies in the media companies, so it’s not like it doesn’t happen. And now we have AI generated propaganda to look forward to an even more efficient psychosis inducing stream of lies.
What I’m more curious about is how otherwise smart people are so easily redirected and played tricks on as if they’re babies, too they point they don’t even realize the magic smoke and mirrors show happening as the ball disappears and reappears in the other hand and the young attractive lady survived being sawed in half.
Boop! The government’s got your nose! What will you do without your nose. Boop! Ok, it put it back. Phew! That was close!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/latest-flying-objects-shot-down...
https://nypost.com/2023/02/12/latest-2-objects-shot-down-by-...
Who else but the military would enforce that kind of thing? The cops?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-seen-using-radar...
https://www.overlookhorizon.com/how-to-launch-weather-balloo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scrambling the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
Only got the season wrong …
Fitting prelude and postlude to Alphaville - Forever Young...
This makes the Goldfinger cover (which is awesome) make all the more sense. At one point he starts singing in German and I always just assumed it was for style. In reality - he's singing the "real" song, and one of the most critical parts "censored" for the English version. This is what he's singing in German:
----
"Ninety-nine ministers of war
Matches and petrol cans (gasoline cans)
They regarded themselves as clever people
Already on the scent of fat quarry
They shouted "War" and wanted power
Man, who would have thought
That someday it would come as far as this
Because of ninety-nine balloons"
----
It's a shame he stops there since the German ending is also dramatically better, "Ninety-nine years of war. Left no place for victors. There are no longer any ministers of war. And also no jet fighters. Today I'm making my rounds. I see the world lying in ruins. I have found a balloon. I think of you and let it fly."
The English version ending speaks in metaphor and can even be interpreted to mean it might have just been a dream.
----
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDc
Goldfinger Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQFplXS0DIM
English Lyrics ("censored") - https://genius.com/Nena-99-red-balloons-lyrics
English Lyrics (translated from German) - https://lyricstranslate.com/en/99-Luftballons-99-Luftballons...
Btw, original "official" music video:
I guess they meant red in the sense of "communist" though...
> can China shoot down one of US’ low orbit satellites saying it flew over its airspace?
These balloons beg that question.... The first one was even made to look like a satellite.
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/space-based-missile-defe...
I won't elaborate as the topic is complicated.
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/russia-china-attack-us-s...
This one might have been the one I misremembered, but it doesn't seem like quite the right one: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I think more likely I just upgraded "jammed" to destroyed - its not like I was imagining an explosion, just overwhelming its optical sensors. Problem is I remember some diplomatic back and forth, too.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/china-uses-laser-to-jam-us-sate...
Unrelated, but it looks like can also take out satellites with just regular missiles.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/200...
So maybe I was misremembering, but I really wouldn't be surprised if a sattelite was put out of comission before, but was just not disclosed or admitted to.
Isn't heat detected by infrared? What's the difference?
Countermeasures like flares try to trick a missile's sensor into thinking the hot object it was staring at was the flare going that way and not the maneuvering aircraft going the other way. Modern IR tracking missiles try to stay locked on the object by ignoring hotter or cooler objects that might end up in its view.
The AIM-9L doesn't lock on to the hottest thing, it takes an IR picture of the scene and follows the targeted "blob" in the image that's generated. Additionally it has laser proximity fusing so it knows when it is close to the shape it is tracking. By not simply picking the hottest thing in a scene you can't hide in front of the sun anymore, and the effectiveness of flares is reduced.
The only thing needed to generate a "blob" good enough to target is sufficient ΔT between the scene and the targeted object.
The objects, and they have been curiously consistent with calling them "objects", definitely have sufficient ΔT compared to the background sky if they are made of any solid material that has been exposed to sunlight for any period of time.
That's the extent of my knowledge about the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonytellez/2023/02/08/here-a...
I'm being picky but still
EDIT: judging from your post history, I wonder if you're a ChatGPT bot trained on US military documents. You do love the lingo and unnecessary acronyms.
pla peoples liberation army
usn us navy
scs south china sea
isr intelligence surveillance reconnaissance
p8 recon plane
conus continental united states
ew electronic warfare
tldr you learn more rummaging through someones house than going through their mailbox. You can limit how much the house owner knows about you by limitting what you carry. Previously US mostly rummaged through PRC house and mailbox using very expensive tools. PRC limited to US mailbox but broke into the house using a paperclip. The price of tools matter less than the kind of new info that can be gathered. US also not happy PRC is finally in her house. US family more opinionated and may compel US to reveal she would otherwise not want to reveal to kick chinese home invader out. Chinese s family locked in the basement and don't know any better.
It’s intentional in order to create a mysticism about government and military matters to impress the commoners.
There’s even legislation and policy directives to require the government to use and require common language instead of jargon. In typical government action fashion it is of course only effective in a very limited, below threshold manner, but it also cannot affect the people in the private sector so use it to feel important to commoners and project their mediocrity to those in the know.
It’s very much the same kind of behavior as is common in the financial sector to cover and obscure and obfuscated the scheme.
US has the favorable hand
Edit: looks like I was wrong. The balloons were only 40-60k feet, which is within the range of military aircraft. reply
https://weatherscientific.com/collections/weather-balloons/p...
If they're flying really expensive stuff at commercial flight levels, that's pretty dumb since it will be shot down.
Seemed like a good strategy until about a week ago!
The F-22 was probably used in the most popular case as a show of force.
As far as missiles go, I wonder if you even need any weapons to down a balloon? A supersonic pass in its general vicinity would hit it with a shock wave and a lot of turbulence. Would that be enough to damage it sufficiently to down it?
(I don't think this is realistic, just musing about other schemes that could be going on.)
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/how...
Any airliner is a flying object full of dangerous chemicals, flammable and toxic.
The original question was about a balloon filled with a dangerous substance, not civilian air traffic.
Civilian air traffic is regulated by the Chicago convention, and shooting it down would be undoubtedly be the responsibility of the nation shooting it down.
The difference is largely one of consent. Nations have the right to control what happens in their air space. But if they consent to civilian air traffic, then shoot down an aircraft that nation is responsible.
If they consent to a balloon filled with dangerous substances in their air space and then shoot it down, then the nation is responsible.
If they *do not* consent to the balloon filled with dangerous substances and shoot it down, then the originating party is responsible.
But it still comes down to consent. If it’s not there at the consent of the host nation (either specific to that situation or via the Chicago convention), then the host nation has every right to take the object down, and the originating party bears most of the moral burden of the situation.
Now, I’d still want the host nation to act as responsibly as possible (for example, the US not shooting down the original balloon over land due to risks to people on the ground).
I still think the jump from the original moral scenario of “no human on board balloon with a potentially plausible argument for being there” to a “passenger aircraft full of people, clearly operating under the Chicago convention” is… quite the leap and really not fairly representative of the original question, and therefore quite unfair to hold to the people who answered the first scenario.
It feels like asking “who’s responsible if bomb disposal techs blow up abandoned luggage”, and then turning around and asking people who respond “Oh?! So what if those bomb disposal techs blow up a bus filled with people??” It’s just not close to the same scenario, to the point of feeling almost like bad faith.
"Article 5: The aircraft of states, other than scheduled international air services, have the right to make flights across state's territories and to make stops without obtaining prior permission."
Seems like you don't need permission for a flyover using a baloon because it's not a scheduled international service...
“No aircraft capable of being flown without a pilot shall be flown without a pilot over the territory of a contracting State without special authorization by that State and in accordance with the terms of such authorization. Each contracting State undertakes to insure that the flight of such aircraft without a pilot in regions open to civil aircraft shall be so controlled as to obviate danger to civil aircraft.”
Separately, Article 3 rules out a state from playing “I’m not touching you” games with a balloon:
“No state aircraft of a contracting State shall fly over the territory of another State or land thereon without authorization by special agreement or otherwise, and in accordance w ~ t hthe terms thereof.”
Where's the line drawn if the dangerous thing I mentioned before has a practical use? Maybe the balloon is filled with a mix that is toxic to something (crop, livestock, etc). Or there's a component of the payload that is dangerous when hit by a missile or making contact with the ground?
I'm guessing China sees this all as low risk research and nothing more exciting than that, but just trying to imagine what else might be going on, or come next. (I'm not anywhere near either China or the US.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
There may be airlines with slogans like "come fly the friendly skies", but entering controlled airspace without a flight plan or 2 way comms with ATC is anything but friendly. You can try it yourself! Rent a C172 and do some sightseeing in Washington DC. When you get shot down, they will blame you.
That might seem absurd, but I believe a lot of countries have made a similar argument for pollutants and waste they dump into the air or water. It took decades for instance to get Canada to stop dumping (literal) shit in waters that end up in Puget Sound [1].
A kind of negative of this arises too, when someone takes something out of the atmosphere or water that passes through their territory and someone downstream had been using that thing.
Generally countries don't really do well when it comes to shared resources like atmospheres and oceans and rivers as far as what happens when one does something involving that resource in their territory that affects it in someone else's territory.
[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/victoria-bc-will-finally-...
e.g., if the dangerous substance in question was a gas mix for the balloon or cooling liquid for the payload, or "Whoops, how did those fruit fly capsules get in there and accidentally drift over California?!"
I'd say the balloons are chosen for a reason. Send surveillance craft over the USA and a huge percentage of the population would see it as an intrusion. Let balloons float over and some of the population will be: just weather balloons, we're wasting missiles; I haven't seen the balloons so they're making this up so China looks bad; what if the wreckage lands on a school, etc. Surveillance and destabilisation, is my guess.
I can appreciate this is quite far fetched given that the material would need to drop such a distance rather than completely disperse with wind, and not be super obvious about it (e.g., pellets).
The grey area I'm musing about is in the middle, and how some portion of the public might be sympathetic, how this might be destabilising, and what avenues the agitator might explore.
The bigger question to think about is the fear itself that led you to this question, the fear, the vulnerability and the anxiety you are feeling. Perhaps if americans weren't so frightened all the time there would be less wars?
'The bigger question to think about is the fear itself that led you to this question, the fear, the vulnerability and the anxiety you are feeling. Perhaps if americans weren't so frightened all the time there would be less wars?'
I'm not American. I live almost about as far from the US as it's possible to live on this earth and don't feel any anxiety about this. Just a curious observer.
I'm not sure what anxiety it is that you're talking about.
As an American, I'm not anxious or afraid "all the time." In fact, I'm generally relaxed and happy.
Sure, some folks have anxiety issues. But that's not limited to Americans, is it?
While more people in developed countries are prescribed anti-anxiety meds[0] than elsewhere, such folks are a small fraction (~5%) of the global population.
And so I'll ask you, of what exactly, do you think that Americans are "so frightened all the time?"
Listening to politicians blather on about "keeping Americans safe" and the like, which is pure theater that's designed to generate votes, is a poor idea if you want to understand how Americans actually think and feel.
These recent shoot downs are an excellent example. No one complained when similar balloons flew over the US before. Why? Because our military deemed them not to be a threat. And no one cared.
The Chinese surveillance balloon was deemed not to be a threat (as was alluded to in this week's public briefing of Congress) and even when it passed over "sensitive installations," countermeasures were put in place to mitigate any intelligence gathering.
That one group made a big deal about it (even though when this happened previously, they were (in closed session) briefed on the matter, and the public was none the wiser.
The difference now is that the public is aware of this stuff and rather than focusing on maintaining and strengthening national security, some folks are attempting to use this to win political points.
Shooting down the Chinese balloon was probably a good idea in order to better understand Chinese technology in this space, and knowing what the Chinese wanted to look at gives us even more information.
As such, jamming/restricting encrypted comms/camouflaging such sites (again as was alluded to by DoD representatives in an open committee hearing, with promises of more detail about that in closed session) and then taking the vehicle down in an area where civilians aren't at risk was smart.
Shooting down those other objects was a direct response (and serves the same purpose) to the political posturing about the Chinese balloon. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
[0] https://www.ihealthcareanalyst.com/global-anxiety-disorders-...
I won't elaborate as the topic is complicated.
Much more likely sounding/meteorological balloons - a lot of those are sent up every day, worldwide, with payloads that are roughly cylindrical in shape. And some of them can traverse huge distances, even across oceans, so such "UFO" doesn't need to originate locally at all.
A strong jet stream can exceed 250mph.
https://twitter.com/markp8183/status/1546936037112393728
EDIT: To give a more clear example. It took XL-Calibur a little more then 30 hour to travel from Hudson Bay to Yellowknife. That is not much shorter then some distance between Montana and Huron
My suspicion is that the descriptions have been of the payloads. They sound like balloon payloads. Maybe the balloon is low visibility. But doesn't explain why government doesn't mention balloons.
The outside possibility that isn't aliens is anti-gravity. I would strange that anyone who developed anti-gravity would keep secret and use it like this.
The first balloon didn’t have this consideration because it could be seen from the ground.
Your enemy only needs to be slightly better than your capabilities to beat you. If they can judge it accurately, they can more efficiently spend resources to counter your ability. If they misjudge, they either waste a ton of time and money, or they end up outmatched.
It’s like a game of poker. Those who are good at strategically releasing partial information are at an advantage.
So they call it an object because that's what they know.
Like this could mean that there was only octagonal object, the balloon was octagonal, or the payload was octagonal. The latter seems the most plausible. It is hard to tell if this is more balloons or something really weird.
>The object was shaped like an octagon with strings hanging off it and no discernible payload, according to [a senior administration official] and another source briefed on the matter.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/object-shot-down-lake...
“A unidentified object has been shot down by U.S. forces over Lake Huron, according to the Department of Defense. The object appears to be the same object that had been detected over Montana a day earlier, said officials.“
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/12/1156428862/us-shoot-down-ufo-...
pilot selection of aim9 over guns due to difficulty/risk of engagement is concerning. would really like recoverable intel, or at least some more detailed assessment prior to engagement.
I'm assuming this information is just not being released, but it begs for obvious scrutiny.
we want a picture
A cylinder that was 20’ long, and 5’ in radius (which is a lot bigger than my minivan - would be about 1570 cubic feet.
That could lift about 100lbs at sea level… at flight level 400… that’s going to have to be a huge balloon to lift 100 lbs or the payload has to be tiny tiny - which is possible but I don’t think something the size of a car is adequate.
1. A lighter than air craft or drone with a small payload
2. A man-made object that uses unknown physics
3. Aliens
I know everyone wants a cooler answer, but I see way too many people being irrational here.
Your are dramatically underestimating the size of these things:
The Chinese high-altitude balloon shot down over the Atlantic off the coast of South Carolina over the weekend was 200 feet tall and carried a payload the size of a regional airliner, a U.S. Air Force general said in a briefing on Monday.
The balloon's superstructure and hardware weighed "in excess of a couple thousand pounds," said Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-spy-balloon-size-200-ft-jet-a...
Here's a similar sized one NASA put up a few years ago: https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm
That being said, ultralight glider technology is actually really good. It is plausible with ultralight materials you could build a car-sized thing, put it on some kind of solar-powered glider and keep it in the air for a long time.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Because we're starting to get those answers.
There has been (and that was just last week), an open Senate committee hearing[0] with DoD officials about the balloon, a classified briefing about same and a press briefing[1] by Senators after the classified hearing.
I watched the Senate hearing and got lots of good information, with even more info gleaned from stuff alluded to and teased to the Senators for the classified hearing.
With much more to come once the House comes back into session I'm sure.
[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?525930-1/defense-department-of...
[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?525949-1/senators-speak-closed...
Plus I reject the idea of secrecy from the citizens, government can not be "for the people by the people" if they keep secrets from the people
Why do citizens need to know detailed specs of IR optics systems installed on fighter jets? I can come up with reasons why this information should be kept out of adversaries hands: and handing this info out to citizens makes the latter impossible
Does it? and even if it does do they need to release the full resolution... you seem to be creating strawmen just to justify the government doing thing in secret, seems like an odd position.
And quit with the "adversaries" scare mongering, it will get you no where with me other then enteral cringe and eye rolling.
This "but the other baddies might do something" has been the straw man to justify all manner of immoral actions by the US government over the decades that I have no sympathy for that argument at all
>>Why do citizens need to know detailed specs of IR optics systems installed on fighter jets?
because we paid for it, because we own it, because we can not accurately hold elected government to account for their actions if we do not know what they actions really are. We have no idea what they are shooting down. Maybe it some private plane of of political enemy, maybe is a Alien Drone, maybe is some weather balloon, maybe is a Chinese Spy Drone......
We only have their word... and their word means nothing to me
This is the same reason all cops should be required to wear body cams and make the video public
It is non-sense
At the same time, we[1] don't demand that detectives publish notes from ongoing investigations, yet we pay for that too. Not acknowledging the reality of adversarial circumstances is shortsighted.
1. Perhaps I'm being presumptuous and you think investigations should be fully transparent in realtime.
(/s, if that was necessary to clarify)
Any information given to the public (you) will also seen by the enemy (whoever it is)
It's like when America used to go on television during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and announce where they were going to do surprise attacks and then get butthurt when they got wiped out.
There's endless good reasons in the intelligence business to keep things secret.
Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...
Most dolphins are smaller than a compact car, but I bet they would break apart upon impact with a frozen sea after dropping out of the sky. This might be the correct answer.
There’s something hilarious about the idea that, if this was the start of an alien invasion, our journalists and politicians started off the coverage not being curious about what on Earth these objects were, but instead slinging political slime at each other
People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.
The one civilization that somehow missed gravity manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.
That doesn't even make sense. Why would having simple gravity manipulation stop progress on the development of other technologies, particularly weapons?
Especially if, as it seems, those weapons aren't mitigated by having gravity manipulation? Literally no one in the universe realized the potential of having gravity manipulation and modern technology?
It’s kinda like asking - why have some of the world’s brightest minds spent the past 20 years trying to get people to watch more ads? What else might they have achieved or discovered instead?
Just think of what kind of technological advancement it would take for _us_ to determine there was life on some planet, and then the subsequent advancement we'd need to actually send something there. And then, imagine actually bothering to do so, when you're at the level of technology that it would imply to have the ability.
Why bother?
This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.
It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.
Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.
However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.
So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.
If anyone imagines fighting alien invaders with small arms they’re already stupidly out of touch.
Same thing for aliens, imagine an alien refugee ship capable of FTL but needs a special fuel that it has to collect from deep Earth ocean very slowly, perhaps for a few million years because Earth only has very very few of such fuel. There is not much the refugees can do. They don't have weapons, they still habe to gather food and energy, they can't do a lot of bad things to locals (us)
Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.
(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)
0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/261470/Distant_Worlds_Uni...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAAHgAuti84
Also, in the Watchman comic the world is made believe in an alien invasion to bring world peace (the ending is different in the move).
So let's hope that if these are (real of fake) aliens, the result will be a more peaceful world.
I wish that I could believe this. We have all seen the deleterious effect of Q and Fox News, and the zeal that goes along with them. At this point I believe that there are those who are so far gone into the partisan abyss that they would rather collaborate with alien invaders than with their fellow countrymen, if those countrymen were Democrats.
anyone have any info on if this could be a similar ufo?
[0] ADVCE20 from Phoenix https://fr24.com/ADVCE20/2f2d34d7
edit: superbowl
looks like this is standard for superbowl flyovers
Why FTL? or any of the things you list. We are already looking to fly tiny probes past alien exoplanets with Breakthrough Starshot.
If you can get balloons into earth safely, you can also just pelt the planet with big chunks of metal at speeds more deadly than nuclear explosions.
Maybe the UFOs were built to withstand alpha-gamma-laser-magma-pulse rays, not our primitive projectile based weaponry!
A premise I was skeptical with but utterly fell in love with once I read it.
[1] https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
—Thor, Stargate SG-1, “Small Victories”
The air defense folks increased the sensitivity of radars and started finding the UFOs. Maybe the UFOs were keeping away from population areas and radars but now were being picked up.
It is strange that the objects aren't stealthed. Which makes sense for balloon payload. But stealth, hovering, car-sized objects should be hard to detect. Maybe aliens don't know about stealth. The other weird thing is that they just hover. For advanced or alien technology, I would expect them to move away or dodge.
Fighter jets don't just sit in hangars all day. They're no good without trained pilots.
A high altitude glider being repurposed for surveillance seems like a plausible explanation for all this.
That is why spy satellites at much lower altitudes can be useful to spy on other countries. However anything below 100 km is considered an intrusion into the sovereign airspace of a country.
Now that they’ve said that, I’m actually more concerned and it raises more questions than it answers. Perspective of some retired NORAD employee would be very welcome
That is what is currently happening, and it’s a little odd that the linked article didn’t seem to mention this. Divers with special cold water gear are being sent to fetch debris from this latest object, and a similar situation is going on for the others.
Perhaps there’s some system where downvotes encourage a post to be taken off the front page quicker. But I suspect moderator involvement. Which is misguided if so: people will simply post dupes and continue to upvote them. Thus, the story is still on the front-page, but in a fragmented manner.
Even just an image of the objects would help, but at the moment we have nothing and there is not much opportunity to provide insightful comments.
Letting the first one fly across the country and generate so much coverage just prior to these latest events seems more than a coincidence as well.
Normally we'd merge the comments into the earlier post, but since this article has more information, I'll merge them hither instead.
Why can't we just hook them to a tether on the ground and get some free air balloons?
Even if it was full of plutonium, there probably is no better place for it to come down.
Lake Huron is neither particularly remote (from, say, civilization) nor is it land.
Because they are potential hazards and threats.
> How do we know there is no dangerous material in them (e.g. radioactive)?
Any material falling from a high altitude is dangerous, which figures into decisions about where and when to shoot them down. But if someone is floating hazardous payloads without permission and notice over your airspace, you probably don’t want to give them the choice of whether and when they come down....
The resources (including “human resources”) we use to check the sky are not the same resources used to track undersea threats. If anything, an elevated general state of alert from probing in the one domain makes it more, not less, likely than any intrusion in the other would be detected.
(mostly kidding...)
The USAF has purchased more than 10,000 of the AIM-9X model alone (not counting the other operators, domestic and foreign, and not counting all the other variants of the Sidewinder, the basic model of which has been in service since the 1950s).
That's a helluva lot more than "one per career".
https://www.navair.navy.mil/news/Air-Air-Missiles-Takes-Deli... 1
How much food and housing, medical care and education could that have provided?
They need to find a way to deal with this for $100 a pop or it's going to get stupid.
ie. Homeland Security is military. Not part of the Pentagon budget.
But 2000 balloons would be a billion dollars if they keep using sidewinders because "they can so why not".
I guess people are focusing on it because anyone that counters them ends up looking like they are trying to minimize a rather calamitous event.
Like burning off the vinyl chloride monomer is going to produce quite a lot of gnarly stuff like hydrogen chloride (which turns into hydrochloric acid when in solution with water), but there hasn't been any information produced that indicates that there will actually be a persistent problem stemming from it (at least, relative to the emissions environment that exists).
Just ask an Ohioan where the come from and they're likely to say "Pennsyltucky" (Pennsylvania and Kentucky being eastern and western border states to Ohio), to obfuscate the existence of their severe danger zone![0]
[0] cf. Poe's Law, as this note serves as a "clear indicator" of my parody.
Look aliens!!!!!!!
Probably the best stealth there is: to be classed as noise.
In fact, the NOAA launches dozens of weather balloons daily.
Seems like recent attention is causing a bit of an over correction.
That's not a "necessary function of any civilization," that's dereliction of duty to the people who elected the leaders.
I think that the US Air Force had been feeling a little left aside when it comes to the whole war thing, what with all the discussion about tanks and artillery and related stuff, this is the perfect opportunity for them to show that they're worth all the money the US taxpayer is throwing at them.