Did an F-22 Blow Up an Illinois Club’s Hobby Balloon? | Hacker News Reader

Did an F-22 Blow Up an Illinois Club’s Hobby Balloon?

nymag.com

67 pointsStratoscope76 comments

Yesterday’s discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824653

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34814717

What's even cooler than your club launching a high-altitude balloon? Losing it to a $200MM stealth air superiority fighter.

> What's even cooler than your club launching a high-altitude balloon? Losing it to a $200MM stealth air superiority fighter.

I'm actually kinda surprised and air-to-air missile could even hit a 3 foot balloon.

The first shot missed one of them

Imagine being able to tell people that your hobby project had to be taken down by the single most advanced Air Superiority Fighter ever made! Talk about bragging rights.

Gotta say, I'd personally trade the balloon for the story I'd be able to tell.

There are quite of few of these amateur radio balloons aloft at any given time. It cracks me up that so much money was wasted taking one of them out.

You can track them real-time here: https://amateur.sondehub.org/ (zoom out and look for the balloon icons)

Very cool, thanks. Too bad they're not able to ping ADS-B receivers, which are likely much more ubiquitous.

Impressive that NORAD can detect, and an F-22 can then hit such a small target with no substantial heat signature using a missile.

No, not impressive. The club is a radio hobby club and the balloon is a radio beacon balloon, which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open frequency, as do basically all balloons. Except for those from china, apparently.

If they really shot down that balloon, and not a Chinese one, they used a 500,000 rocket started by a 200mm plane to kill a $100 balloon. Spending so much on so little on the other hand is impressive.

> which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open frequency

Usually once every hour or every other hour for a quick second long burst, otherwise they are powered down and just floating. Pico balloons can't carry more than a few grams and depend on solar panels to charge up a battery enough to transmit.

Also air to air missiles are not magic. They don't have secret decoders for every imaginable protocol to lock on to targets (and assume they aren't lying about their location). They are either slaved from the planes radar, contain their own radar, or use heat signatures to lock on.

Your overall point stands, but I can see where the original poster seems to be coming from. There are "anti-radiation missiles", which lock into transmitters to blow them up.

IE: The AGM 88 "HARM" missile does this. But these are not used by air-superiority fighters like F22, but instead by "Wild Weasel" fighter jets against ground RADAR targets.

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I think the poster you responded to magically assumed that a AGM-88 would work against a balloon. But that is mistaken: the balloon isn't transmitting enough of a RADAR signature for something like HARM to lock into it.

As a taxpayer, I think the AF using a $100 (or was it $12) balloon for target practice is way better than say the $570K BQM-167 remote drone that they'd normally use!

https://dronedj.com/2021/03/24/the-air-forces-training-drone...

Those cost differences are striking. An adversary could launch thousands very cheaply. I wonder how militaries would react to so many potential targets.

In the worst case, you would react by directly attacking the adversary that launched them. Hopefully by the time things had reached that level you would have had an opportunity to exhaust all diplomatic channels and could have found a more peaceful resolution.

With technical escalation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon

Investment would lean back towards gun based AA, like anti-air artillery since the objects are so high. Investments are already going back into that direction as cheap drones like the SHAHED are easily managed affordably by systems like Gepard. It's actually quite fun to see these systems revived.

I think laser-based weapons would be more likely, honestly. It should be possible to heat up a balloon enough to melt the envelope without an absurd power supply.

Perhaps not so well when everyone's a Captain Kirk.

They said thousands, not 99.

And they usually have radar reflectors on them also.

Such as - https://www.overlookhorizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/5...

Missiles are not designed to lock onto voluntary transponders, for hopefully obvious reasons, meaning the AIM-9x in this instance has demonstrated either a very sensitive IR sensor, or a very sensitive radar setup.

Sure there's a radio signal, but Sidewinders are heat seekers. While I can believe one went for the electronics package on the Chinese balloon these pico balloons shouldn't have anything more than a bit of solar heating.

Detecting them is probably easy--note the balloon material appears shiny. Probably aluminized mylar, it will show up on radar.

Of course the rockets are heat seeking. But someone has to give the order. They have sensors, they investigate. They report up the chain of command. I don't even want to know how many people were involved from the moment it was detected to the moment the order was given. 100? 1000? More? And no one bothered. And the US weather service alone starts around 60,000 to 100,000 balloons a year.

It doesn't matter how you FIND an object if you can't target it. That's why articles crying that china can track the F22 and F35 are meaningless, because knowing something is in your sky and being able to direct a munition into it are very different things. Pilots who have practiced dogfighting the F35 have expressed surprise at just how close you can be and still be unable to get a good enough radar return from the targeting beam to actually shoot at it.

Can you explain why the chain of command has anything to do with whether or not it should be considered an impressive technical feet for a thermal-imaging missile to lock onto a balloon?

I didn't say it was a good use of resources.

When you think about it, not really. The F22 went into service 15 years ago and has a radar cross section about the size of a honey bee. I would hope that our air defenses would be designed to detect aircraft like that, and I would also imagine a balloon with no thought to stealth would show up really nicely on any radar that didn't filter it out.

As for the heat signature, and I admit I'm doing more guesswork here, it works via IR contrast. As long as the balloon was sufficiently warmer than the air around it, and you were close enough, it should track just fine.

For NORAD and other air defense platforms, they're a ton of filtering that must be done to ignore cruft, otherwise they'd be responding to floating plastic bags, birds, etc, constantly.

From the missile system and fighter radar perspective, that's not something they heavily (if at all) test these platforms against, because that's not a threat there's any expectation to face.

I think it's hilarious that our defense tracking infrastructure is too good at seeing stuff and that causes problems.

only took a couple of tries

That was a different UFO, the one over Lake Huron. This one was over Canada.

Isn't each missile $400k?

Each missile purchased puts food on the table for a defense contractor living in Chantilly, VA. (The military industrial complex welfare state is very lucrative as long as you keep your mouth shut, your head down, and obey)

No wonder they blamed F-35 programme as the main reason why American roads aren't fixed.

Which is always a stupid take. America is absurdly wealthy. We could burn half a trillion dollars a year in a big bonfire and still easily afford all the niceties of a modern nation like good infrastructure and healthcare.

We might have to actually tax a proportional amount from ultrarich and megacorps, but I'm perfectly fine with the people receiving 70% of all increase in wealth since the 50s paying a significant amount of tax.

Who did? The worst roads in America are all (meant to be) maintained with local/state money. The road surface of the federal highways are all in a reasonable state, although many bridges are sketchy. The F-35 isn't the reason an average country road in America looks like the surface of the Moon.

https://archive.is/VTC5W

Is nymag paywalled? I've not observed any access restrictions.

Edit: Got it, thank you!

Honestly, even if it isn't, I appreciate the archive link.

I've often found HN threads that are many years old while researching things, and the original article is long gone. An archive link at least _usually_ works.

I didn't hit a paywall when I first opened the article, but when I clicked a link from this article to the one about SBF and the Super Bowl, I got a paywall on that one. And then when I hit the back button to go back to the balloon article, it now had a paywall too. So I posted the archive link in case anyone else runs into this.

just open in a private window to hide cookies

This whole "balloon gap" story is a textbook example of where media interests actually lie and manufactured consent.

First, the actual Chinese spy balloon was a complete non-story. Large nations spy on each other. The SR-71 was invented for the US to fly over the Soviet Union. Yet it got wall-to-wall media coverage. Why? The usual reasons. It evokes fear (and this part worked) and plays into the need for even more military spending (because almost $1T/year just isn't enough).

All this while an actual catastrophe is taking place, the East Palestine derailment, with a virtual media blackout. Why? Because the media as a general rule doesn't criticize corporate interests. Hell, the company responsible (Norfolk Southern) has a case on this term's Supreme Court to attempt to overturn a PA law that people can sue a company that does business there. The actual case involves someone who got cancer.

And the Biden DoJ has filed an amicus brief in support of Norfolk Southern's case [1].

I really wish more people would recognize the balloon story for the intentional distraction it is.

[1]: https://www.levernews.com/bidens-doj-backing-norfolk-souther...

Maybe this is why they're not super keen on recovering and analyzing the wreckage...

or why we tend not to worry about a bunch of f'n balloons.

A balloon could have a nuclear bomb, viruses, sophisticated RF equipment, who knows what on board. We do have to worry about balloons. It's a non-negotiable national security issue.

In imagination land, sure.

In WWIII the Japanese firebombed the US with balloons. Are you Chinese?

This whole affair has made the us intelligence apparatus and executive branch look supremely incompetent.

I think it's funny. It reminds me of a paragraph in Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" book in chapter six:

There are far-reaching, visionary, and even revolutionary implications to the space program. Communications satellites link up the planet, are central to the global economy, and, through television, routinely convey the essential fact that We live in a global community. Meteorological satellites predict the weather, save lives in hurricanes and tornados, and avoid many billions of dollars in crop losses every year.

Military-reconnaissance and treaty-verification satellites make nations and the global civilization more secure; in a world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, they calm the hotheads and paranoids on all sides; they are essential tools for survival on a troubled and unpredictable planet.

It made them look extremely bureaucratic and slow.

We've been hearing about declassified reports about UFOs for years, indicating ignorance about airspace incursions.

It took a gigantic Chinese balloon slowly traveling uncontested across the country for the government to be sufficiently embarrassed and take action.

Have you considered whether that's the point of these stories?

It was a strange few days. The big multi-bus-sized balloon was ignored for several days while it loitered over sensitive areas, then, suddenly, they turned up the sensitivity and may have shot down hobbyist balloons. It's as if NORAD etc., were caught unprepared and had no idea which way to go on this and were waiting for a decision higher up and then went bananas.

Still there's something incongruous, it was claimed the USAF did flybys before shooting them down to ensure the balloons were not misidentified manned balloons.

>The big multi-bus-sized balloon was ignored for several days while it loitered over sensitive areas,

Weren't they escorting the balloon with jets the entire time while pushing nonstop news stories about it? That's ignored?

They didn't escort the balloons. Maybe they made a flyby. A balloon goes with the speed of the wind, the f22 can't go that slow or it falls out of the sky. Especially at the heights we are talking about.

No comment on the executive, but the intelligence apparatus? They tracked the Chinese balloon from its launch on Hainan Island. They did their job. Identifying and tracking hobby balloons is somebody else's job.

I suspect what the intelligence apparatus would recommend, and what the politicians _do_ for "optics" in any random context, are very different.

I thought it might have been some poor grad student's dissertation project.

I love the choice of words... "blow up" and "hobby balloon" can't be an accident, right?

So the club members . . . were they Chinese or extraterrestrials?

If it did, I would presume it wasn't targeted. I'm not an expert in radar tech or whatever else is used to pick up objects but I would think something that small wouldn't get picked up easily on radar and whatnot (except for some sort of beacon identifying what it is)? Likely, it was close enough to the Chinese balloon explosion that it was affected by it?

Did you even read the first paragraph of the article?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

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