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A comment on U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.

Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by scotty79 on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:48PM (#34660270)
Why didn't they just down it safely harpooning it from a helicopter or something? Didn't they want to investigate the payload in detail rather than mangled remains?

Was it really just a scientific baloon but US found it more useful to accuse Chinese of sending grotesquely large and not stealthy at all spy balloon?

Otherwise why destroy it?

EDIT:

I stand corrected that USA just didn't have the technological capacity to do anything other than firing a missile at it from a fighter jet.

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by this_steve_j on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:56PM (#34660332)
The balloon was traveling at an altitude of 60,000 ft., well above the 40,000 ft height a commercial aircraft or the highest experimental helicopter can fly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_China_balloon_incident

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by Andrex on Saturday February 04, 2023 @08:06PM (#34660424)
"Why didn't they just"

If you ever start a sentence this way, please, just do 30 seconds of Googling instead of posting the comment.

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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by qbasic_forever on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:50PM (#34660286)
Helicopters can't fly up to 60k feet or so where the balloon was floating.
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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by throwmeaway1212 on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:51PM (#34660294)
How much experience do you think people have harpooning a spy balloon from a helicopter? and landing it safely.... I...can't believe there's many people who have experience in that...
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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by sv123 on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:50PM (#34660288)
60,000 feet up.
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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by popilewiz on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:49PM (#34660275)
It was about 20km in the air. Helicopters don't fly that high
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Re:U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance ... by akomtu on Saturday February 04, 2023 @10:21PM (#34661452)
Harpooning from a helicopter was one option, but it would be better to harpoon it from the ground or use a bigger balloon to capture this smaller balloon. Yet another possibility was to drop a sharp object on it from a satellite.
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