U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by ipqk on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:20PM (#34660069)

I don't know how big this particular one is, but high altitude balloons get really large because of the low pressure.

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

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

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by jer0me on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:53PM (#34660311)

Here's the image if anyone is curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20020909235156if_/http://remus.j...

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by misja111 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:02AM (#34663825)

But weather balloons are typically much smaller. See e.g. https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/, this is the largest one they sell and it has a bursting diameter of 45ft

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by kgwgk on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:12AM (#34663884)

I’m pretty sure that they had a budget higher than $700 and wanted it to carry more than 3kg of payload.

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by mactunes on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:05AM (#34664219)

This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at.

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.

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