With all the high tech developments the Department of Defense has access to, it seems as if there should have been a way to capture the recent spate of balloons and other devices. For instance, if they had used bullets instead of a rocket that blasted the thing apart, wouldn’t the balloon have lost altitude to a level where it could be snagged by something? The copters that were used in Vietnam come to mind as quite maneuverable and could be used to capture it when it got low enough with some sort of gang hook - at least in my imagination. It just seems such a gross act as opposed to a more delicate or precise action. We have NOTHING that could have done that?
I was wondering if a plane rigged for the Fulton System might be used. But I have heard that the experts are worried that the payload might have explosive devices to prevent capture.
LOL no, a Canadian balloon took well over 1000 shots from a cannon in a plane and still managed to make it all the way across the Atlantic until it finally downed in Europe. I don’t think you realize just how big those balloons are, and they aren’t tightly filled with gas the way you’re likely imagining them. Put a hole in them and there’s just a hole, no big deal. Plus they fly way higher than the flight ceiling of fighter jets and they’re slow so the jets have to fly around them a lot just to fire on them. If they get lucky they can put a missile through the thing but there’s very little for the radar to lock onto, the balloon itself doesn’t register to a missile. There’s a reason they use high flying huge balloons to spy with, they’re very effective and rather hard to see.
Delicately snaring large moving objects at 60,000 feet, complicated by jet stream winds, poses quite a challenge.
It’s not like you could just send up a tech with this to do the job.
I’m guessing it would be possible if we threw enough money at the problem, but it wouldn’t be worth it.
Indeed.
If, somehow, someone in charge decided we needed to capture these things intact, it would still take months and millions to even get a prototype.
And it would suck to learn the hard way that these devices had an energetic self-destruct mechanism.
This is only true of the huge, high altitude balloons, 200 feet in diameter or so. You could fill them full of holes all day and they’ll just slowly sink down.
But the smaller balloons which have been shot down in the last few days are only ten or twenty feet across, and they are probably inflated using stretchy, rubber-like materials which would burst if you hit them right. Being small these balloons will be a challenge to find.
In the very early days of the space program, it was thought that a good way of recovering returning manned spacecraft would be to snag them out of the air by an apparatus trailing behind the airplane, and then presumably reel them inside. One issue with this is that even the smaller balloons are much too big for this sort of capture. Another potential issue is that the system may have been shown to be unreliable or unsafe, as it was never used.
RocketLab intends on using this technique to catch their boosters. They come down on a parachute, which has a little mini-parachute farther up. A helicopter matches speed and uses its own hook to snag the thing.
It’s tricky enough at low altitude and catching a thing explicitly designed to be caught. 60k feet and something not designed for it? No way.
From the Wiki cite, it seems to me that the Fulton system requires some sort of harness device on the target to be hooked by the aircraft. What sort of hook can be used on a balloon without a harness?
Question #2, wouldn’t the propwash from a fixed wing aircraft or the downwash from a helicopter blow the balloon around too much to snag with a hook?
You can always make the line for the hook longer to reduce the downwash. That makes it harder to maneuver and snag–though maybe you could attach a drone-like device to the end to perform the final maneuvering. May even be possible to use it to circle around the target, wrapping it up like an AT-AT.
Making the balloon heavy would work, money is heavy, so yeah. That is a fine method if you get the money to stick. When back on the ground you can recoup the money and use it for more pleasant activities.
What, other than another balloon, can fly slowly enough at 60,000 feet to stay close enough to capture a balloon? I thought we needed a U2 just to get a picture of the payload.
make sure to use coins and not your credit card …
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i am sure, there are a couple of smart heads sitting and debating the same somewhere in the armed forces of the USA …
I also wonder if a low-tech threat might best be fought with a low tech solution …
what type of old (and slow!) airframes are/were there with a high service ceiling?
so - instead of a rocket with stubby wings (like today’s fighters) - an extreme “lifty” glider with (smallish) engine …
That’s essentially what the U2 is. The U2 is not an easy plane to fly; at altitude its maximum speed is only 10 knots above its stall speed. The airframe is very delicate, as it must be as light as possible.
Just for comparison, a typical hot-air balloon is about 40-60 feet in diameter:
Sports balloons average between 65,000 and 105,000 cubic feet and carry from three to six people. These balloons when inflated vary in height from eighteen to twenty-seven metres and are between thirteen and eighteen metres in diameter.
I wonder if anyone’s working on a formula for a self-healing membrane?
Some of that work has already been sold on much higher pressure consumer level tires. The basic research just needs tweeking for a specific application,
All speculation on my part.
Explain this more - a hole is a hole. Gas escapes from holes. 1000 cannon holes are a lot of holes and can release a lot of gas. There has to be more to it.
It’s unlikely more than 10 rounds actually hit. Each of the holes is 20mm in diameter, and we’ll credit each hit with two holes for through-and-through.
At altitude, a weather balloon has literally 30,000+ cubic feet of gas volume, and you wonder why it takes a long time to escape through a grand total of 6,300 square millimeters – equivalent to a square hole 8 cm on a side.
What is the pressure differential in/out of the balloon, at altitude?