Apparently these balloons don’t just pop and plummet when they’re shot down, they can take several days to actually descend:
The balloons are stealthy, and can fly at altitudes of 90,000 feet or more, putting them well above the reach of most surface-to-air missiles. They are also extremely hard to shoot down: there are no fuel tanks to puncture or engines to damage. Shrapnel that would destroy an aircraft simply leaves a few small holes in the balloon envelope. When a giant weather balloon drifted off course in 1998, Canadian CF-18 Hornet pilots riddled it with more than a thousand cannon shells and several rockets with no noticeable effect. British and America jets also failed to bring the stray balloon down and it only crashed after several days.
Got a genuine LOL out of that. Thank you; you win the thread.
More seriously, if the balloon is Chinese spy stuff, it’s much more likely to be doing electronic surveillance than recording images via camera. For detecting whatever sneaky radio stuff the US uses, you’ve got to get closer than high orbit.
As noted by others above, shooting these things down is hard. Any attempt has a high risk of failure which would be a face-losing move for USAF / DoD. IMO the “We didn’t shoot it down because we might hurt somebody on the ground” is pure misdirection for what’s really “We didn’t try because we’d probably fail and look inept.”
Another thought is this is essentially the equivalent of the USN FONOPS near the Chinese coast inside the “nine dashed line” where China claims sovereignty over far more ocean than any treaty permits. The Chinese are sending an unsubtle message of “We can overfly your country any time we want carrying anything we want. Neener neener!”
An interesting meta-question is why the DoD decided to go public about this balloon and not (AFAIK) any of the several previous such balloons. What is different this time?
There’s not much atmosphere up there. And it’s real cold. Even if you could put a sustained flame against the balloon envelope until it starts to burn, it might well self-extinguish as soon as your flame was removed.
And of course, over in the MAGASphere this is proof of some combination of:
-Biden’s ineptitude
-Biden being in the pocket of the Chinese
-Military being to woke to shoot
The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure.
Even if that’s a total crock, it’s probably good that they felt the need to say it.
You don’t need a balloon to see the nuke silos here in Montana–you can see them from the highway. And they are plenty big and plenty obvious enough to spot from a satellite. I would be completely shocked if any satellite-capable nation did not have a comprehensive map of all our silos.
Not that I trust the Chinese government, but their explanation seems reasonable. They know where the missile sites are already as does every other interested government. Next on FOX- is the balloon being controlled by Hunter Biden’s laptop to identify American gun owners?
As with that Australian radioactive capsule story, this one bristles with unanswered (and probably unposed) questions
1.) Why didn’t we hear anything about this until the balloon was over Montana? Shouldn’t this have triggered some sort of flag as soon as it entered US airspace?
2.) If this is a Chinese civilian balloon gone wrong, why didn’t the explanation make the new immediately, or at least when the balloon was over US territory?
3.) I agree that the Chinese could learn about US things from “way up high” by using spy satellites, which everyone knows are up there, and which people don’t generally complain about. Using an extremely visible balloon is a hugely public thing to do, and there’s no point unless you either DO want to make a splash. Or you’ve got a spy camera with lousy optics.
By the way, as I’ve observed before, even though many copies of Around the World in Eighty Days has a balloon on the cover (and it’s in virtually every movie version), at no point in Verne’s novel does Phlleas Fogg ever ride in a balloon. Verne probably would’ve loved the idea – several of his heroes take balloon trips, and it was the subject of his first big hit, Five Weeks in a Balloon. But it’s not in AtWi80D.
