The Chinese are advanced - there's no chance they couldn't/didn't monitor a balloon of this size launching into their airspace. There's no chance they do not know the true origin and owner of the balloon.
If it were civilian/private and/or university - this would have been easy to explain and prove. The balloon may have still ultimately been downed (it was violating airspace regardless of who owns it) - but the situation would have gone rather differently.
Two things. It will be significantly better at ELINT, soaking up signals over which it floats. Second, at 60,000 feet it is at least an order of magnitude closer than LEO spy satellites are, if not more. Simple physics dictates the limits of resolution for the lenses for spy satellites. Being significantly closer makes it much easier to provide better images than a multi billion dollar spy satellite. All at a significantly lower cost.
Another way to reframe this is that you would get a higher resolution looking at an object 100 miles down from space then you'd get looking at an equivalent object 100 miles up.
(Keyhole satellites are at 200 miles.)
Of course, knowing when satellites are above you is a bit easier to know and prepare for (the governments usually know where sophisticated adversarial satellites are). The smaller satellites I think are quite a bit higher - 300 miles - so the balloon can probably beat them provided it can get with 100 miles (even though there's a lot of those).
We've been at the limit since the 70's, btw. The Hubble space telescope was enabled by the spy satellite program - they didn't just "happen" to have an extra mirror of exactly the right size, they made them for spy satellites.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/09/us-spy-satellites-at-d...
Are you suggesting that encryption is useless against a superpower? If that’s what you’re saying, the same applies to anything transmitted on a cable.
If it really was a signal intelligence balloon, I don't see what it could possibly learn.
There is still a lot you can learn from analyzing encrypted signals. The metadata itself may be quite valuable, and any world power undoubtedly does cryptanalysis.
SIGINT is valuable even if you can’t decrypt the contents, in fact when you can it’s usually COMMINT.
SIGINT provides you with other valuable information such as frequencies used, cadence and also allows you to uncover new locations of forces and installations.
Also governments still use a lot of unencrypted or partially encrypted communications - cellphones are a great example even if voice and data is encrypted the cell ID and other valuable metadata isn’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873156
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HAARP [0] was built in 1993, and its often been accused of being able to incite tectonic response from the Earth. Obviously, this is the tinfoil... but for a couple decades HAARP has been blamed for earthquakes.
What I find interesting in this, is that with the "spy balloons", aside from the one which was shot down over the Atlantic, after 'passing through' Alaska and then across the US is supposedly "Chinese"...
The other balloons were shot down over Alaska, and over Billings.
Interestingly, both HAARP and the other balloons for weather tracking are from University Fairbanks. (and there has been a lot of posts recently for the strength of the Aurora - such as the super bright one yesterday from Alaska which made the entire night and snow glow strong green color)
Video from GeoEngineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBt9rqXkcXo
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>>"The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emit light of varying colour and complexity."
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Now for the core of the conspiracy ; If HAARP can cause earthquakes through the interactions between the Ionosphere, or the beam pointing from bouncing waves off the Ionosphere, it would be interesting if that activity was being measured/tracked through the balloons that they use to measure aspects of the Ionosphere, and the blowing up of the balloons was to destroy the evidence of tracking and monitoring the effects of 3.6 Million Watt beams being shot up from multiple locations, and converging on the same point. Its interesting that we have Earthquake Lights - where the atmosphere above a major earthquake will light up the sky just prior to the EQ, kind of like sheet lightning, due to the changes in ionization. (and recall, there are treaties that were signed (supposedly) decades ago banning weather-warfare...
There was a 6.4 again in Turkey today, more building collapsed, but were apparently building that were already damaged in the previous.
So if we could look into the correlation between very strong Aurora, EQs, and when/if one of the HAARP installations was active at the time... (look at the wiki for the image of the activity bands:
https://i.imgur.com/D7xqMHK.png
Notice that "high activity" is the RED band, which is closest to Turkey's region... and then look at this path of the chinese balloon, which roughly follows the path of the bands in the Aurora output:
https://i.imgur.com/DocezpQ.png
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There are also patents related to using HAARP to send ULF both into the atmosphere and into the ground... (see patents below)
So, I find it interesting to correlation (not causation) for massive geological event (a 1 in 1,000 year series of earthquakes in Turkey - in a swarm where typically each of the earthquakes by themselves would still be considered massive, and more than 60,000 people have died so far (the current official number claimed by MSM is 45,000 - but there are thousands who were recovered and buried without being added to the tally, as well as thousands of bodies that were pulverized and wont be discovered for a time, if at all)
I am not saying this is how it is, I am just saying I find all these coincidences odd...
Obviously turkey is basically bordered by tectonic boundaries ; the timing of everything is bizarre.
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/HAARP
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8299936B2/en?q=(HAARP)&o...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8115622B2/en?q=(HAARP)&o...
Maybe not. Satellites are highly predictable and things can be tucked neatly away when they’re known to be overhead.
And the same can't be said for a balloon which flies wherever the wind takes it? Does China think NORAD is a joke or that we're incapable of modelling weather patterns?
It doesn't fly wherever the wind takes it. It is designed to move vertically between air layers to whichever layer has wind blowing in the direction it wants to go, and it has turbines to steer itself a little bit on top of that, that's why it's got almost 15kw of solar power onboard. You can literally maneuver the thing in a box-shaped pattern between those air currents and make it hold position over a target area, or at least you can try. Google was doing this a decade ago and it works pretty well.
Actual Project Loon flight paths: https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/955500294921736192
> Much like hot air balloon pilots would do to get from place-to-place, these unmanned balloons ride global wind currents like rivers, climbing, and sinking to find the right flow to get to a destination. Google’s computers take weather data from NOAA and determine which current they need to hitch a ride on to reach their destinations. The balloons can only go up or down.
https://www.wdbj7.com/2020/07/07/googles-project-loon-high-a...
Don't believe the spy angle that much.. maybe this is not about what its purpose is right now, but what it might quickly need to be at some point.. imagine nations start shooting their satellites, orbit becomes unhabitable, and you still want to go spying.. or just replace your satellite based comms network!
Put any equipment you want inside generic chest on a balcony.
Gotcha.
Nope, which is why Google and Apple pay heavily for on-the-ground recording and aerial photography for their maps.
Even optics 1/10 the size of Worldview would be massive, and this baloon has nothing like it.
What is it using, a GoPro?
It's impossible to tell from looking at it in a photo taken from that distance what band a parabolic aimed (pan/tilt motorized) geostationary satellite antenna of that type is. Unless you're close enough to measure the diameter of the feed horn. Small size means it's unlikely to be C-band as not enough gain unless you want to waste a huge section of transponder space at BPSK modulation and ultra low bps/Hz ratio. It could be X, Ku, high Ku, Ka, etc.
Also extremely likely a craft like that has L/S-band more omnidirectional low data rate command and control radio talking to something in orbit. Basically same idea as L/S-band Inmarsat but operated on military satellites. Obviously the Chinese government won't be using Iridium.
Somewhere I think there are also some laid off ex Google Loon project engineers who are having a good laugh about this whole thing.
This platform is an order of magnitude larger and more capable than a normal weather balloon and thus much more expensive.
Balloons aren't "bad satellites" or "poor-man's satellites." Satellites and balloons each have different things that they are good at.
Certainly the altitude differential and ease of navigation (presumed, mostly due to balloon having propellers vs. satellites having either much more costly navigation or none) raise this question.
>has $100k of solar on it
Tell me you live in CA without telling me you live in CA
I’m unfamiliar with solar panels in this application, but would each panel really be $6,250? That’s >20x premium over panels used for terrestrial application for use on a platform that would have little dynamic load.
In US taxpayer dollars maybe - but in CCCP money, its paid with slave blood, just like how Appl likes it.
370w panel for $266 (there's lots of good deals out there if you shop around).
If you want to save more money and buy by the pallet (22 panels), they're around $182 each for 330w: https://sunelec.com/shop/solar-panels/suniva-330w-solar-pane...
What about getting the power ut of the panels? What kind of other kit is required to accomplish this? a transformer and marine batteries?
For reference, the US plans to spend about 7 million per day over the next five years to build new satellite systems.
https://spacenews.com/dod-satcom-big-money-for-military-sate...
Looks to have around 16x300W solar panels, so roughly 4.8KW. A lot but no unreasonable given it has 4 electric turbines and it would take a lot of grunt to influence a balloon of that size especially given air density altitude.
If it is a civilian craft it's either government or maybe one of the big Chinese universities.
Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks to be Ku-band satellite or similar) but it also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites.
I don't think it's obvious what the purpose is. It's clearly very large, probably reasonably pricey. The platform alone has ~100k of solar on it, probably another 80k in propulsion, power systems and connectivity.
By no means is it outside the means of civilian agencies or even private companies in China. Given the cost of high resolution civilian aerial imagery this actually looks pretty compelling vs aircraft or satellite (which lack the resolution of normal aerial photography platforms).
The other thing is that it stands to reason is that if you build this thing, regardless of it's purpose it's going to circle the Earth pretty much no matter what. Except if you deliberately down it of course. A balloon this big, up this high isn't coming down and that propulsion system isn't going to have enough authority to choose which continent you fly over.
Anyways, super interesting. Maybe we see legit commercial implementations of this sort of platform in the coming years though it seems like it will be good fun trying to register these with all the various airspace it will inevitably fly through if you launch it.