Fair enough, but fairly sure F-22 can only carry air to air missiles, and guided bombs.
Other fighters can carry Maverick missiles for anti-tank work and such, but no where near that height with a weapons load.
And I am doubtful the fuze would see it as a target, but that is only a guess on my part.
Wait, the F-22 has no ground attack capabilities? That’s… stupid.
The F-22 was designed to be purely an air superiority fighter. And while they usually are loaded out only for air to air, they can carry bombs too.
“That’s no balloon.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”
Space Cowboy uh?
How much is the reward?
Seems like many of these suggestions would reveal more about the US capabilities then just letting it float around. Particularly if the balloon was intended to invoke and assess a response. Or am I being needlessly paranoid?
No it’s not. Especially since it is tracking a course over military facilities that have been known to house rockets that may be aimed at other countries. The military said the path seems quite specific and it is not just following the course of the jet stream.
Balloons are so difficult to steer and so obviously visible that this is almost certainly an accident. The only thing that seems significant is that the Chinese released a very large balloon in a location where it could have accidentally travelled over the USA; that suggests that they aren’t scared of offending anyone any more.
All of which can be seen quite plainly on Google Earth.
Balloons are hard to steer. Upper level winds at a given altitude aren’t that hard to predict. Current weather models do that all the time. Is this thing visible from the ground during the day?
Do these kinds of comments add anything to this discussion? Just curious.
Is Falcon Heene accounted for?
[Yeah. My town. You’ve gotta’ love it…]
This was my thought as well.
Now there’s one in my neck of the woods…
The idea that China can’t steer a balloon is not credible. Google figure out how to do it over a decade ago (project Loon) and spun off a company from the project.
A company that is now defunct, after tens of crashed balloons all over the world.
Which of those things say you can’t navigate a balloon?
Most tellingly, the fact that Google don’t use this system any more. Note as well that Google relied upon data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which I somehow doubt that is available to the Chinese (although I may be wrong, in which case the NOAA are to be congratulated on their openness).
It seems likely that the Chinese are simply sending up large numbers of these balloons; they have been seen over Japan, Hawaii and the Andaman Islands, and they could easily wander over the mainland US. Perhaps there are spy instruments on board - but it seems unlikely that there are cameras, or that the balloons are being accurately steered.
I mourn MTG’s revealing the Jewish Space Lasers, rendering them useless.
On a different topic, it is quite windy and if I had a balloon it would likely be off-course.
It was in NE KS at 9:30 and it showed up in St Louis around 2:30. That’s about how long it would take me to drive there.