The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico balloon over Canada
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The, in theory, purpose of such a balloon is going to be something like satellite surveillance but low and in the are long enough to use certain types of sensors that would not work that high up, or that can now penetrate much further into the ground.
Not that I really think there's much to be worried about, as even if this is the case its more "nations who's only war will be miserable nuclear fire pretending there's a chance it could be others", but there is absolutely a plausible reason for these.
I am growing tired and weary of some people thinking everything is fake or some distraction from other things, as if humans are completely incapable of focusing on more than one thing at a time.
Just don't tell anyone what you are gathering for the purpose of spying. Just tell (if anyone would be bothered enough) what you are a blogg^W influencer and making a new TikTok.
Yeah, like a Chinese national renting an apartment in some weird place and frequently "hiking" near missile silos with a bunch of unusual electronics isn't going to attract unwanted attention. The FBI would be totally fooled by your influencer ruse.
You know what's so great about spy baloons? They're things not people. Using them doesn't put any of your people at risk. That's, like, a consideration.
If a balloon looks innocuous, then it might be a great tool to do something with.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/where_can_i_fly/airs...
Spy balloons (and drones) are 100000% a thing. I think it's laughable that you can even try to argue otherwise.
As to why the US suddenly cares publicly, probably mostly political because the Chinese balloon was spotted by a civilian and there was a public outcry. That doesn't mean they aren't happening, nor that the governments across the world aren't aware of them.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...
you're own link: "Drones are prohibited.. from the ground up to 400 feet above ground level"
This, charitably, is called moving the goal posts. I fly over/near a nuclear plant every couple of months on my way somewhere. I am not a drone. Pilots fly over silo fields and nuclear plants all day, every day.
Nuclear silos are generally not that sensitive, because they are all 60 years old and everyone can identify them on satellite imaging, but if you fly a drone near one, you will definitely be surveilled by some security, whether you know it or not.
The HN guidelines ask you not to do those things, because they degrade discussion and we're trying for something else here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You did it repeatedly in this thread, and unfortunately have been doing it elsewhere too—and we've had to warn you about this kind of thing more than once before. When accounts behave this way, we end up having to ban them. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments repeatedly. We end up having to ban that sort of account because it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. I don't want to ban you, so it would be good if you'd fix this going forward.
I also find our own reaction somewhat telling. It seems difficult to imagine that $800 billion a year isn't enough to find some way to recover a balloon. Yet we chose to destroy it, and send the debris for a swim on top of it. Whatever's left of the device is almost certainly completely wasted. Would you want to do this if you believe there might be evidence of surreptitious behavior, potentially to try to compromise high security locations, on that balloon? Or would you deploy signal jamming technology and work to recover the balloon intact?
Our reaction just feels like a meme. I can't help but hear this song [2] playing in the background as I envision an F-22 making its flyby locking on $400k missiles to bring down a balloon.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/us/politics/chinese-spy-b...
So if you can send satellites over unmolested, maybe you also try with a huge-ass balloon. It's way cheaper. Worth a shot.
So if spy balloons were considered a real threat - why isn't there a more cost efficient way to take them down?
Yes. It is funny how, after US, everybody started seeing one.
Be alert...
The HN guidelines ask you not to do those things, because they degrade discussion and we're trying for something else here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/why-shooting-down-chin...
“In 1998, a rogue weather balloon from Canada deployed to measure ozone levels accidentally drifted away. BBC reported at the time that the airship was the size of a 25-story building and was operating at an altitude between 27,000 and 37,000 feet, so admittedly much lower than China’s balloon is now. The incursion prompted attempts from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to shoot it down, with two Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornet fighters firing more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from their own Vulcan cannons into the balloon off the coast of Newfoundland. That balloon took days to come down, at one point even gaining altitude and drifting across Canada and then out over the Atlantic Ocean, which made for a problematic situation for regional air traffic.”
The point I should have said was "Were any of these flying over a restricted area that couldn't have been easily checked out by a drone? If not this seems like an unlikely spy mission, or at best a poorly-planned one."
There's an argument on both sides.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
[1] https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-lak... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2jcm7qklWU
Scroll down to the press briefing. It’s not literally Joe Biden, but it’s his mouthpiece making statements and answering more than a few questions (and being surprisingly playful) on many issues, including this one.
The question you raised (“can we hear directly from the President?”) does get asked, although the answer is basically “we can’t speak for the President’s speaking schedule, but he’s closely involved in the decision making.”
Personally, I don’t see what hearing from Biden directly would add.
Edit: Coming from a military family, and given that military action has been taken, I strongly believe the American people should be hearing from their Commander in Chief. I don’t accept John Kirby’s excuses. Joe Biden should be the person talking about military action taken against a geopolitical rival, not John Kirby.
Regardless, the president DID brief about the original incident. Is what you're trying to convey that you would feel safer or more validated if there where continued briefings for the other objects?
No point for CIC to put egg on his face to the entire geopolitical landscape by saying "we shot down some US domestic commercial balloons".
Nobody cares that you’re from a military family. It adds absolutely no weight to your requests.
It was also to be expected not all of these discovered objects were from foreign state or malicious actors. There's a reason the radar filtered out so much before.
Meanwhile we have a chemical disaster in Ohio that’s killed untold amount of animals, fish, wildlife in a 10 mile + radius…
You are aware that the Air Force is staffed by human beings that are prone to making all sorts of mistakes, yeah?
And there is no reason why the USA can't be both worried about spy balloons and about the chemical disaster in Ohio.
Maybe the targeting pod could give you a zoomed up view, but it's not really designed for nearly stationary, high altitude objects.
[1] - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/air-force-missile-miss...
If it takes a million dollars of ordnance to pop a balloon how are we not completely fucked in any real conflict?
Also bullets work just fine, they just cause slow leaks that could take hours to ground the craft, which might not be what you want.
Jingoism isn't power.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/why-shooting-down-chin...
Baloons and small drones should be downed with lasers. Like cut in half or something like that.
Or they will be if it becomes a real problem anyway.
For radar guided munitions, the surface you are targeting needs to reflect enough of the radar energy for the seeker head to "see" it.
Also is the AIM-9X really only $400k? That's insane for the capabilities it has.
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything on this topic, and I think the Federal Government which spends trillions a year can do more than 1 thing at a time. Statements like this are like saying Apple can't focus on the new iPhone or Apple Music at the same time. It's a ridiculous political trope.
That said, they did miss on the first attempt with the Lake Huron balloon, so I guess it's harder then I'd have thought.
It either needs a hot part for an IR seeker to lock on to, or be radar reflective enough that a high power radar beam can reflect off and be picked up by the missile's antenna and pass a certain threshold of reflected power. There's not much heat in the payloads, and balloons probably aren't the best radar reflectors.
Even gun lead calculations require a good radar return.
I've always predicted we would eventually end up with missiles that guide on visible light, but that's terrifying if it isn't nearly perfect.
Only half joking.
No actual authority to order military or police action, or even to lay out a new law, etc.
https://learn.parl.ca/understanding-comprendre/en/canada-sys...
Although (from above link)
dissolving Parliament and calling an election
I don’t believe we did. The governor general still has the power to dissolve the house of representatives in the constitution which is remarkably hard to change.
> The Governor-General may appoint such times for holding the sessions of the Parliament as he thinks fit, and may also from time to time, by Proclamation or otherwise, prorogue the Parliament, and may in like manner dissolve the House of Representatives.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practi...
Eg: Most recently the GG "sanctified" | "blessed" | "made official" the extra and additional ministerial roles taken on by the former Prime Minister (Scotty from Marketing) but that wasn't (IIRC) an independent action by the GG, just an official Head of State recognition of a decision already made by the political body.
I think that the very fine print in Australia these days is that even if the GG refuses to perform these official blessings they go ahead anyway, and I don't think such things can be keep secret anymore either after Scotty's bit of non transparent role expansion.
I freely confess to be a lot more on the ball about all that 15 odd years back and really not caring much these days though.
Convention is what keeps the GG doing what the PM asks. They can still go completely rogue until the sovereign removes them.
If you aren't seeing "the media" talk about this, it's because you choose to consume garbage media sources.
I don't understand how people always reach for aliens or cloak & dagger stuff when in reality the most likely explanation is that you have some Doctor Strangelove characters running around in the bureaucracy.
Also, I wonder how the heat seeking missile can track such a small and low thermal object. Must be one hell of a sensor.
I think the envelope is gonna be the much more visible target. At high altitude silhouetted against the blackness of space, the balloon itself will be considerably warmer, even in what we consider "cold" air. Or if you're looking down on it from above, silhouetted against the warm ground, it will be quite cold.
Also the mylar, which I presume is aluminized, is a heck of a radar reflector.
Source: have launched small electronics to 100,000 ft on a weather balloon.
> These floater balloons often use only solar panels, no batteries. Batteries were dropped from the projects early on because they have limited charging cycles before they stop accepting a charge, especially in the harsh temps at altitude, -40F/-40C or worse. When the battery stops accepting a charge, it ends telemetry from the mission. So they only report telemetry during daylight, when the sun is at a high enough angle to illuminate the tiny solar panels. In the Arctic winter, the days are short and the sun might not get high enough to wake up the electronics.
A discussion thread somewhere a couple days ago said they're not really "heat seeking" but object-tracking from a video feed, and the video camera just happens (well, deliberately because it works better) to use IR bands instead of visible bands.
Apparently, against the cold background of the sky, a slightly warmed balloon is visible enough.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/The-Chinese-spy-balloon-was-shot-with-...
I think the article has it wrong.
>Unlike latex or rubber weather balloons which inflate and stretch as they rise into lower atmospheric pressures, these mylar balloons can't stretch, so their fully inflated ground size will be the same as their size at high altitudes, meaning the pico balloon won't get much bigger than 32".
The parts that mention expansion say they're referring to latex balloons.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?end=2021... - Military spending in current USD
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2... - Military spending as percent of GDP
Trudeau has been the Canadian PM since 2015 (end of year) and other, than 2016 and 2019, military spending has gone up every year. Over his time as PM there has been a net increase in military spending. The biggest jump was $4.5 billion in 2017, from $17.74 billion to $22.27 billion.
It's interesting to see claims targeting a particular politician show up that are so easily shown to be false. What's the point?
(I personally don't think we should spend anything but the bare minimum in defense here in Canada, since we obviously depend on our neighbors anyways. But that's the argument for saying that Trudeau neglected the armed forces, as far as I understand it).
So, if you have a link to these strict rules that are defined as you've stated, I'd love to read them just to know exactly how bad I broke the laws (shut up Beavis).
(i) Carries a payload package that weighs more than four pounds and has a weight/size ratio of more than three ounces per square inch on any surface of the package, determined by dividing the total weight in ounces of the payload package by the area in square inches of its smallest surface;
(ii) Carries a payload package that weighs more than six pounds;
(iii) Carries a payload, of two or more packages, that weighs more than 12 pounds; or
(iv) Uses a rope or other device for suspension of the payload that requires an impact force of more than 50 pounds to separate the suspended payload from the balloon."
Translation: To be exempt from the rules of high altitude balloons your balloon must have no more then two payloads at 6lb per payload, cord no stronger than 50lb (fairly weak / most fishing line is too strong), and not be too dense.
Your payload sounds probably fine unless it contains a chunk of tungsten for some reason.
There's also a maximum balloon size and some other rules worth reviewing.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
And there's no real indication this balloon didn't follow the rules, neither of us know what Canada's rules are.
The references to size of birds and softness definitely was questioning my recollection of the rules I had read.
https://www.startrek.com/database_article/tomorrow-is-yester...
Is it just that unlikely?
You can track them at sondehub.org. Recovering them is a fun hobby, I have several sitting on my workbench. You can harvest STM32's off the boards.
This sounds amazing. How could I get into this?
Is the balloon structure occasionally left intact enough to refill and reuse?
The payloads are usually in great shape unless they come down in a road and get run over. My local launch site flies RS41's and you can find photos all over the internet. There's two lithium AA's inside, a couple of STM32s, and a Ublox GPS receiver.
Getting into it, just pop onto sondehub a bit past noon or midnight UTC and see what's in the air. If there's one predicted to land near you, keep an eye on it and head out. If a sondehub feeder station is nearby, you'll hear it down pretty close to the ground, and the landing prediction will usually be spot-on. If the nearest station is still a long ways off, then you'll lose it at the station's horizon which may be several hundred meters up, and what happens in the terminal phase of descent is anyone's guess.
To improve this, become your own station. There's a list of receivers on the right sidebar if you click the help button. I threw rdzTTGOsonde on a random Heltec lora board I had sitting around; the board was wired for 915MHz and the sondes use 404MHz which comes in the 433MHz Rx chain. The supported_boards page says:
> The 868/915 MHz version contains the SX1276 receiver chip. The chip supports both 433 MHZ and 868/915 MHz, but using different input pins. The board connects the antenna to the 868/915 MHZ input pin, the 433 MHz pin is unconnected. Theoretically the 868/915 MHZ version can be modified to work as 403 MHz receiver by directly connecting the antenna to the right pin of the chip, but this requires somewhat advanced SMD soldering skills...
So a few minutes later... https://i.imgur.com/aBmvnwh.jpg
And this sonde was polite enough to come down in a parking lot where I could literally drive up to it. I didn't even get out of the car to grab it: https://i.imgur.com/qMTVhR3.jpg
(I did get out a few seconds later to pick up the balloon and throw it away.)
It is not that it is unlikely but that the consequences would be very low. There are limits on the density and the mass of the balloon. If an aircraft hits it the same happens as if your car hits a butterfly.
The butterfly dies and your car won’t even notice it.
The relevant exceptions are in cfr 14 part 101.1.4:
(4) Except as provided for in § 101.7 , any unmanned free balloon that- (i) Carries a payload package that weighs more than four pounds and has a weight/size ratio of more than three ounces per square inch on any surface of the package, determined by dividing the total weight in ounces of the payload package by the area in square inches of its smallest surface; (ii) Carries a payload package that weighs more than six pounds; (iii) Carries a payload, of two or more packages, that weighs more than 12 pounds; or (iv) Uses a rope or other device for suspension of the payload that requires an impact force of more than 50 pounds to separate the suspended payload from the balloon.
https://casetext.com/regulation/code-of-federal-regulations/...
When you give cops pepper-spray, suddenly half the interactions end up in pepper spray.
When you give them tasers, suddenly tasers constantly used.
When you give the military free reign to use sidewinders domestically, suddenly they are burning them up at half a million dollars a pop.
They even somehow "missed" one of the shots too, that didn't get too much coverage.
Ukraine just shot down Russian balloons.
> When you give the military free reign to use sidewinders domestically, suddenly they are burning them up at half a million dollars a pop.
No, they are using the cheapest weapon most likely to work, given the public/political demand that "something" be done. It is not an ideal weapon to deal with balloons, but it (clearly) mostly works.
> They even somehow "missed" one of the shots too, that didn't get too much coverage.
It's not surprising. The sidewinder is designed to track aircraft, and ignore decoys (e.g. flares). Balloons don't look like aircraft, they don't move like aircraft, they don't have a significant thermal signature (some contrast, when approached from ahead/below with clear (cold) sky behind them), and they definitely don't have the kind of IR/UV signature that dual-band seekers (like the Stinger or SA-18 have) are looking for. The reason to use the sidewinder is that the other missile carried by US interceptors, the AMRAAM, is both way more expensive, and requires some sort of radar signature (and likely some sort of "plane-like" flight characteristics, to avoid decoys like chaff) that a balloon without a radar reflector is not going to have.
Second, what kind of useful sensors will they put on small balloon? I guess might be able to fit camera, even long lens, in the 12lb payload of small balloon but doubt get much useful info.
Third, we may see a movement to put transponders in larger balloons. Requiring ADS-B would be reasonable.