As several others have mentioned, it seems as though the Chinese would expect the US to see it.
That looks like a tethered aerostat to me. A good idea, but free-flying balloons are a bit more difficult to steer.
Maybe this latest Chinese balloon was the first one (among numerous launches) which came anywhere near sensitive sites in the USA; all the others could have been failures, or beta tests.
Band name.
The Goodyear blimp is maneuverable. Electric motors would give some ability. NOAA could provide wind direction and speed at various altitudes. I’m looking forward to the recovery. I hope they ill release some information.
True. I was just countering the claim that balloons can’t be used to gather intelligence.
I would bet a decent chunk of change that the Chinese balloon did not have motors for maneuvering.
You “steer” a balloon by climbing or descending to take advantage of different wind directions and speeds at different altitudes. Which of course means that for whichever 3D spot in the sky you occupy right now, the range of speeds and directions you can move is limited to whatever winds happen to be available over that point on the ground, and within the range of altitudes you can move to, and by your knowledge of what those winds at those other altitudes are likely to be. All those challenges make balloon navigation difficult and especially so over very long distances. “You can’t get there from here” is a very real problem with balloons.
The drag associated with trying to push a very lightweight sphere through the air via propellers or whatever is simply ginormous. Impractically un-overcome-ably ginormous.
Said another way, if one wanted a steerable drivable powered airship using a gasbag for lift, one would shape it like a blimp, not like a balloon. To reduce the drag to a manageable number. Building a high-altitude blimp is well within any major aerospace power’s technological capabilities. The fact this Chinese device is not blimp-shaped fairly well guarantees it lacks propulsion.
India is also a geopolitical rival. Seems straightforward.
The other difference with tethered aerostats vs free balloons is that the power to run the intel-gathering devices can come up the cable from the ground. Here’s some info on a similar deployed US system:
I’d expect a free balloon not to have the power to run e.g. a long-range radar like the aerostats I cited.
Though IMO passive electronic eavesdropping devices, imagers, computers, etc., should be readily doable. Given that even up at the rather high altitude of 100K feet the range to the ground directly below is a mere ~20 miles, the idea of a high resolution but small footprint ground mapping radar is (WAG) not totally out of the question, but maybe a bit iffy.
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If these Chinese balloons are anything like the Google Loon balloons, they will ‘steer’ by using an on-board reservoir of helium to increase their buoyancy and rise into a suitable airstream later. If you want your balloon to go down into another airstream, you simply let out some helium and down you sink. In theory, you could go back and forth over the same bit of land for an extended period of time. But when the helium reservoir runs out, the balloon goes down towards the troposphere, and loses the ability to steer.
Note that the projected track of this balloon that originated in China assumes that the balloon has not made any deliberate changes of altitude for navigation purposes. Conversely, if the balloon has not made any deliberate navigation manouvres, the fact that it flew over Malmstrom is probably sheer luck.
Or you could drive past the military bases on the ground and get the same info.
Might be tough to drive a car with a radar antenna past the guards at the gate.
True. I was thinking more about passive SIGINT/ELINT. Actually using radar from a balloon would be unacceptably intrusive, I think. But maybe the Chinese don’t care.
Recovery has started but Pete Buttigieg said the debris field is “about seven miles long.” That’s quite a bit of ocean to cover.
Officials in Myrtle Beach are expecting some debris to wash ashore.
If the Chinese still had communication with the balloon (and assuming it was a “spy”). wouldn’t anything of intelligence value have been destroyed remotely?
Balloons (tethered, I think) were used by the Union in the Civil War to gather intelligence.
The types of devices used may show what sort of information they were after.
Logically it would have been transmitting to satellites above. The Military said they were jamming it. they were also probably illuminating the payload with so it couldn’t see anything below. We’ll know more when they get around to public briefing.
“Illuminating the payload” would that be subjecting it to the radio frequencies it was emitting?
Stored data, perhaps. Depending on how good their anti-tamper and remote-destruction tech is. But you could still capture signals sent to/from the balloon and use those for intelligence purposes. And of course recovery of the actual hardware is potentially useful.
Monitoring how the balloon responds to various control signals would be useful both for SIGINT and OPSEC purposes.
Finally, while the US government will probably rely on the “had to wait until it was safe” excuse, I have little doubt that at least part of the reason for delay was to make sure we didn’t reveal any capabilities regarding response time wrt how quickly, accurately, etc. this sort of device could be “neutralized”.
Possibly, or optical illumination to render any photographic equipment ineffective.
Speaking as a former electronic warfare professional, this sounds like it might be PR or a degree of deliberate obfuscation. Granted I’m sure the US DOD has some neat stuff, but jamming is generally achieved not by jamming the TRANSMITTER, but by jamming the ability of the receiver to receive the signal; you are, in an electronic sense, shouting louder than the transmitter. The US DOD wouldn’t be jamming the balloon, they’d be jamming the satellite - if in fact that’s how the balloon send back its info, it could have been sending HF back to terrestrial receivers. You’d absolutely, positively have to know which it was to jam it. The military would have had to be broadcasting a signal at the Chinese satellite(s) (or terrestrial stations) of the same frequency/type as broadcast by the Red Zeppelin, but at at amplitude great enough to essentially drown out the competing signal. (This is why jamming in warfare must be done sparingly; the jamming transmitter is very loudly announcing their exact location, making them immediate targets, and they are also giving away what you know and care about in the enemy’s use of the electromagnetic spectrum; often, passive exploitation of enemy signals is much more productive, and it’s orders of magnitude harder to prevent.)
Jamming can be something of a technical challenge, to say the least, and raises a few obvious questions; if they can do that why not just do it all the time at rival satellites? Do they really have Chinese satellites that well fixed? And if it’s not that hard to jam such things why would the Chinese bother? Their satellites can just take pictures, you can’t jam that.