It will be very interesting to see, to the extent that details are released to the public, the parameters and specs of this thing.

I wonder where the cutting edge is today?

Even the types of arguments made for this kind of thing are the same.

> Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases.

Claiming "weather research" is basically one of the oldest lies on the books you can make which kind of concretes the fact that it wasn't for weather research.

    >The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them.
    >[...]
    >On 22 November 2020, United States official sources [...] announced that the six-month period was over and the U.S. was no longer a party to the Treaty.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-sp...

Ok, but having it drop into water should increase the chance to retrieve less damaged parts to investigate then. I'd call this thoughtful, not indecivise.

And they are claiming it was for safety purposes.

I assume this is something similar, just more to assess what the response is than how quick a known response is.

I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population?

How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down?

If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.

For example, I could find that this ballon reaches 200ft diameter at 100,000 feet.

https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm

I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.

Looking the pictures this payload was at least 250 kg ( 551 lbs ).

The typical calculation is a liter of helium would have a lifting force of one gram.

So we need 250000 liters of helium meaning a sphere of 250 cubic meters.

So for a volume of a sphere at V = (4/3)πr3, we get the radius at r = (3V / 4π)1/3. Aprox 39 meters ( 128 feet ).

So I am going to put the diameter of this thing at 80 to 90 meters ( 262 to 295 feet ). Quite large I would say....

So if it appears the same size but twice as far away, the the length and height are each 2x. So that would make it the size of ~4 airplanes

There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping the thing would stay aloft for a long time?

My guess is that the actual package of equipment - batteries and sensors - is quite small. Maybe a telescope and gyro stabilizer or gimbal was part of the setup. Insulation probably bulked it up quite a bit; it's very, very cold at that altitude.

I'd be curious what sort of uplink they were using, assuming the thing was actually fully functional as a spying device. I'd say there is a decent chance it was largely a dummy, designed to see what our reaction would be.

I don't particularly like the precedent we just set. There's no evidence it was a weapon, its flight path was easily tracked and slow so our military could hardly argue it was a surveillance threat especially compared to satellites, it's well outside commercial aviation flight ranges.

If they want to send balloons over us at 80,000 feet...let them? Who cares? They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery.

We can hardly point fingers. The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.

Sails are useless in a balloon. The only way to steer a balloon without a propeller is to raise and lower its altitude seeking a wind blowing in the right direction.

Add a fin to a baloon and you can steer it.

And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.

There is no keel on a balloon. Without a keel, one is only going downwind.

Mind == blown*

*Sincere, but pun intended

Is that true? Just from quickly poking around, LEO satellites seem to orbit at about triple the height, moving far faster than a balloon lazily floating along the jetstream. Probably can use a larger variety of instruments as well.

Hundred times the height, to be exact.

Or perhaps both at once. I really hope the details of this craft are published, the machine nerd in me needs to know.

It is a lot easier to take pictures and collect data at 60,000 ft (balloon) than from a satellite in low earth orbit, which is closer to 6,000,000 ft.

https://geo-matching.com/content/new-approach-to-use-ground-...

Outside the atmosphere you would not be able to do it

Yes, SAR [1].

[1] https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/backgrounders/what-is-s...

The Space Shuttle flew missions with an imaging radar that discovered ancient riverbeds beneath deep sand in the Sahara. At the time, some thought it would have worked equally well to disclose buried military infrastructure.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle-imaging-radar-a-si...

Now compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery in their choice of bands.

Commercial satellites can generate 15-30cm images good enough to tell what make and model a car is in a parking lot. https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2020/introducing-1...

Camera gimbals provide image stability regardless of motion in 3D space. Digital post processing is used to clean up images from planes and other moving sources.

> with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon.

People seem to really underestimate the size of these balloons. They are hundreds of feet across and capable of lifting massive loads. Using Google's Loon as an example it had a balloon that weighed almost 200 pounds and carried an additional 175 pounds of solar panels before you even added the mission payload.

> compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery

Satellites have predictable passes and military installations schedule sensitive outdoor activities around them. The problem for defenders with balloons is that they can loiter on station for months at a time making scheduling around them impractical.

The U-2 spy plane did just that, as did Project Genetrix (Unmanned surveillance balloons), and then later, the SR-71 Blackbird, and as much as the Soviets complained, complaining and shooting at them was pretty much all they could do.

They shot down/recovered so many Project Genetrix balloons, in fact, that their left-over radiation-hardened film was re-used by the Soviet space program in their Luna 3 Moon probe.

Because they’re denying it. Presumably, they’d want their denial to be plausible.

If something flies over your country, you get to loudly complain about it and shoot at it.

If you are able to hit it too, good for you.

This overflight was termed by the Soviets as an "Act of aggression". This Chinese incident is no less an act of aggression, and merely continues the precedent.

If the Chinese really wanted it considered otherwise because they had actually lost control of the device, they could have easily warned us of the problem and requested coordinated assistance in recovering their device (which would of course allow us to examine it). The PRC govt did no such thing.

And the critics complaining about not shooting it down sooner are ignoring two key things. First, the payload was 2-4 school-busses in length, and dropping such a thing from 12+ miles up in a random location even in sparsely populated areas is a ridiculous hazard. Second, we can be quite confident that the US military could neutralize any data collection or transmission during the transit, and the shoot-down over our waters eliminated the possibility of PRC recovering any stored data.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurting_the_feelings_of_the_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

https://www.beale.af.mil/Library/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde

The comment you replied to says "no commercial aircraft flies at that altitude" and the concorde hasn't flown in decades.

Edit: By the way, that comment said, and I quote, "Name one plane that flies at more than 60,000 feet, I'll wait."

No word "commercial" there. So, aside from the Concorde, there were/are several others, some already mentioned.

In contrast, every orbital launch has to deal with 10s of thousands of pieces of space debris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Operators

https://www.beale.af.mil/Library/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article...

SR-71: "QQ requesting clearance to flight level 600"

ATC: "QQ, climb and maintain flight level 600... if you can get there."

SR-71: "Roger, descending to flight level 600"

especially in view of the fact that the upper limit of sovereign airspace is not defined by international law. In fact there are proposals to treat the 18-160km zone as a transitional region of reduced sovereignty akin to EEZs.

https://iaass.space-safety.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2...

> Legally however, it is an indistinct region where it is not clear whether the operations that take place are covered by aviation or space conventions and treaties, in particular with reference to the freedom of overflight that applies to space orbital operations

Also:

> Although outer space is free, if states are allowed to claim vertical sovereignty up to the point where orbital dynamics are possible, other states will be precluded from having free access to space

> John A. Johnson, General Counsel of [NASA] and [of USAF], said in 1964 "there should therefore be no legal basis for protesting, merely on grounds of unpermitted presence, the overflight of national territory by ascending and descending spacecraft, regardless of altitude."

https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&con...

Also see:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/43439/is-there-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_sovereignty

For instance, the Pentagon has just reported that several Chinese balloons have been crossing US airspace in the recent years [1], also during Trump presidency. These were not shut down, they were not even reported at the time AFAIK.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/conservatives-blame-biden-ch...

And if they could, other countries would love to shoot them out of the air and it would be fair. You don't put planes like the U2 in operation without being aware of the risks.

I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by pointing that out.

Edit: Different balloon https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-a-weather-balloon-...

Edit: updated the estimate. I got radius and diameter mixed up.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100000%2A%28diameter%20...

That does assume, though, that you got the tallest possible washing machine, which stands at a whopping 47 inches, compared to the industry average of a puny not-even 41 inches.

(It's honestly mind-blowing to me that I could get this data [1] in a few seconds, when it might've been nearly impossible in a sane amount of time ~10 years ago. But I'm also enjoying just citing it really casually.)

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=washing+machine

It's like saying "the real Albert Einstein", as opposed to good Albert Einstein the baker, who is a local celebrity because of his amazing Apfelstrudel.

I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.

Confusing, no. Amusing that this is the hill you’re dying on, fucking hilarious. You go on ahead and own that.

You no doubt believe that Newton, Henry VIII, Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Canute, Arthur and Launcelot, and Boadicia 1) all played association football, 2) called it the one and only "football", and 3) all other "football" sports around the world are bastard versions of it.

The word "Football" dates from the 13th century. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_%28word%29> The sport of association football, no. While people have no doubt been kicking round things for entertainment for thousands of years, association football as a sport is no older than other football codes like American, rugby, Gaelic, and AFL; all date from the mid to late 19th century. That's why English-speaking countries have differing meanings for "football", because it refers to the most local popular football code *no matter what that is*. Let me repeat: Association football has no primacy, seniority, or priority here. It is not the "first sport" or "the elder sport" or the "original sport" among football codes.

>I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.

"Cultural minority", eh? Among the major English-speaking peoples <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)#National_usage>, *Brits are outnumbered—whether by population or number of countries—in terms of how they use "football".*

"Soccer" is a British English word c. 1889. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22633980> According to Stephen Szymanski of the University of Michigan, until 1980 "soccer" and "football" were interchangeably used in Britain <https://web.archive.org/web/20140627210952/ns.umich.edu/Rele...>, when "soccer" became less popular because of a mistaken belief that it is an Americanism. The word still is in use in Britain; see TV shows like Soccer Saturday.

Let me repeat: The association and American varieties of football are merely two of several codes that all emerged in the mid-19th century from people in various countries attempting to formalize in some way the informal sport of "running with/kicking the leather-covered thing" that has existed for thousands of years. Not, as the average Briton who thinks the word "soccer" is a product of 1970s American culture vaguely believes, Americans seeing British association football in action and rudely deciding to change the "mother sport" by changing the shape of the ball and letting players carry it.

EDIT how lazy of me, 285ft diameter, and assuming spherical shell, gives 166 Olympic pools.