My “wild conspiracy theory” continues to be that this was a well-known part of mutual spying and was tolerated up until the Chinese screwed up and one was seen by civilians. Now the US has to act surprised, outraged, and responsive, and the whole thing that was being tolerated is being unwound.
The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response.
I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.
It would be quite a screw up as the balloon over the US was white (not transparent) and massively visible. It was meant to be seen.
The American spy/military program involving Low Earth Orbit satellites is a potential target. SpaceX is launching tons of these satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
This has had me wondering if there is an amateur/civilian role in spotting, (optically or otherwise) high altitude unidentified objects.
I know amateur's are involved in meteorology, aircraft tracking, even spotting asteroids and meteors. It would be awesome to have something pointing up all day with software on the back end — pinging you if a small object traverses its CCD.
An additional, 4d chess theory, is that the US now has something they wish to hide (for the time being) and intentionally leaked the first balloon to the media to cause uproar and “have to shoot them down,” establishing a new boundary with other nations over the use of high-altitude balloons.
The counter position is the idea that these have negligible benefit over satellites, so it is irrelevant. However, why send them if they don’t add new capabilities beyond satellites?
They’re much lower cost than satellites, and if you think you kind find yourself in a war where access to space and/or durable space assets might be denied, good to have an agile backup capability. Might as well just run it to gain expertise and tech.
The US has no armed drones that can operate at such high altitudes, and the UCAVs that do exist don't carry machine guns that could be employed against airborne targets. In theory it would be possible to design or modify such a drone but that would take a while.
Using guns against high-altitude balloons is also challenging just from an aerodynamics standpoint. Stall speeds get pretty high up around FL600 even with large wings, so the airplane would have to fly straight at the target with a high closure rate in order to get within effective gun range. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using a guided missile is much safer.
Problem with shooting them down is that you need a lot of bullets to get the thing to plummet. Helium is always leaking a bit anyway across the entire surface, so adding a few hundred small holes doesn't accomplish as much as one would hope.
In WWI the UK developed AA rounds to shoot down zeppelins and balloons. They were basically tracer rounds with a bigger incendiary charge that ignited when fired and set the skin and hydrogen of balloons on fire.
Modern incendiary and explosive rounds fired by fighter jets aren't effective against them becayse they are only triggered by their impact against a hard target, but I'm sure the DoD could come up with a more effective version pretty quickly if it came down to that.
At their size, the balloon would slowly descend (into public airspace) when shot at with even high calibre jet mounted guns, if i understood correctly.
> when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires fewest assumptions
Occam's razor would say that this is the first time we've noticed a balloon over the US, so we shot it down. Believing that there is an unspoken agreement between the US and China to allow a certain amount of spying and we're only taking a hard stance because the Chinese fucked up and got their balloon noticed by civilians has far more assumptions baked into it.
----
To be clear, I'm not saying the theory presented by OP is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not backed by Occam's Razor.
A theory I heard (on HN) that resonated with me is that the Chinese did this to provoke a response. Now they can take out US spy satellites in orbit over China in retaliation without it looking unprovoked. The degree of escalation is less than if they'd started with that salvo themselves.
Another theory I heard is that they're poking the US to see what responses would be employed, how quickly detection happens, the radio signal / signals intelligence environment, etc.
Shooting down a spy satellite would be a huge escalation, an act of war. The balloon/objects were shot down in US/Canada airspace. Shooting down unauthorized aircraft is allowed by international law. China also hasn't claimed the later two objects.
Space is regarded similarly to international waters. Spy satellites are free to overfly countries.
How about the military sees UFOs on a regular basis but only started telling the public after this balloon thing? After all, we still don't have any information on the 3 things they've shot down since the original balloon.
If this is true, and we are incapable of identifying a simple balloon, god help us all. Imagine an unfriendly third party did something like hang a nuke off of such a balloon????
He's claiming they're all balloons, and that recovering them has been an intelligence windfall for the US - and Schumer would be in a position to know that. Then again, Schumer has seemed to have an obvious anti-China bias in recent years.
I suspect the language used by the USA/Canada concerning these devices is meant to obscure an uncomfortable truth.
These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down. Instead of manning AWACS and defending them, China could flood the airspace with thousands of these balloons and it would be too expensive to take them all down with our current technology.
By publicizing the F22 mission to shoot that balloon down, we kind of showed our hand and it's a really bad hand. Hence the obfuscating language now being used by officials on the matter.
I don't think Chinese military is so incompetent as to believe that the 1st response demonstrated is indicative of the nth response.
Besides, no one's going to run out of missiles, balloons, or money before this escalates in another fashion. This is a rather short stage, not an indefinite future.
It's hardly a "bad hand". If this continues, look for the US, and the rest of the West, doing direct flights over all of China.
Eg, retaliation in kind.
There's zero difference, as said balloons could have any manner of nefarious purpose. Chemical/bacterial/viral, or just plain spying, airspace is airspace, protecting it is a thing, and China has the bad hand now.
What they were/are doing is well thought out, and technically a good way to spy. But the political aspect shows (again) just how poorly China understands the West.
To burn so much political capital, over so little gain, is immensely stupid, a diplomat's nightmare, and completely incompetent.
I feel for China, I do. A huge chip exists on its shoulder, it spent centuries bowing to the West. The betrayal during WWII likely still stings.
So it wants to flex, to be the big man, to strut its feathers, but wings made of wax only take you so far...
I feel like at any kind of scale this would be an incredibly slow type of strategy. An F22 could have been used because initially the DoD had no idea what the thing was and if it was hostile, but as time goes on I really doubt that deploying F22s would continue to be the American strategy. The irony of this strategy is that the US absolutely LVOES to spend money and resources on defense, so this isn't exactly hitting 'em where it hurts.
>These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down.
Not convinced this is true for the large balloon. The helium alone will have cost 6 figures, which is comparable to the cost of the flight time of the F-22.
Also, it's not like the US has a shortage of F-22s and air to air missiles.
Bias necessarily means you’re not thinking straight.
Did you mean “agenda” or “strategy” or “vision”? It is possible to see the CCP as an opponent that should be mitigated without distorting one’s thinking.
The majority of high-level US politicians have had an anti-China bias since about 2011 so Senator Schumer is squarely in the mainstream on that issue. This bias is completely reasonable given the rapid growth of Chinese military capabilities and the malign intent of the CCP leadership. Look into the history of President Obama's "Pivot to Asia" policy; he wouldn't have made that move without broad support from the political establishment.
I came close to launching a weather-balloon with some simple hobbyist sensors for a school project back in 2011 but my team ultimately ended up going with something much less ambitious. Now I'm a little horrified that we came so close to picking the weather balloon because I realize how irresponsible it would have been (although I'm still more horrified at how we were going to just assume the parachute works with no testing or understanding of wind currents; this thing could easily have killed somebody if we had made it and it went down over somebody's house or place of business or a highway).
Another group at my school did actually end up picking the weather balloon project and it landed in a tree in Amish country in Pennsylvania after having been launched from northern VA (somewhat ironically, it was the only tree in a wide open farm of dozens of acres). I wonder how many hobby weather balloons there are up there every day?
I wonder how ironic the tree landing actually is. Assuming a weather balloon doesn't land vertically, but drifts at low altitude for several miles, it probably acts as a kind of tree-finder.
A plane with it's ID as "blocked" took off on a steep climb from near Sudbury ON and is headed in that direction as well. I'd imagine it's a CF-18 jet or something similar...
* The balloons/objects are well known by intelligence agencies and generally tolerated for strategic reasons, but then one becomes visible to the naked eye by the general public, and the agencies must suddenly respond and pretend it's a brand new threat, because the news cycle operates on simplistic headlines. OR
* This is an entirely new and surprising development, and now intelligence agencies are aggressively scanning airspace for more of these objects and taking them down.
* These balloons/objects can't actually provide useful intelligence for China, but by sending them as sacrificial lambs and eliciting a military response, it sets the precedent for China to do the same for any US intrusion on their airspace. (This one could be combined with either of the above two)
* The timing of these balloons corresponds to other intelligence happenings that the general public doesn't know about - i.e., there is something happening in the intelligence space between the US and China, and these balloons signal some message that the intelligence agencies of the US understand, but which the public does not know about. But, again, the news cycle and the voting public demands a response to what they understand, and they do not accept "Trust us, we're handling it behind the scenes" as an answer. End result, you get an F-22 shooting down a balloon, in a highly visible operation. It's unclear if this demonstration was directed more at China or for the voting public.
One final note - we're talking about intelligence warfare between massively powerful nation states, which makes it tempting to theorize and hypothesis like I just did above. But possibly there is nothing much to think about, and the truth is exactly as it seems: China sent some balloons in a spy program of unknown scope, possibly to elicit this response or possibly not, and it became a political mishap for the current administration so it was forced to respond in a public display. And now the event has more implications for US political pundits and news cycles than it ever did for intelligence warfare between these two countries.
>Another high-altitude object was shot down Sunday, this time over Lake Huron, three U.S. officials confirmed to ABC News. According to one of the officials, the object was shot down by a U.S. military aircraft.
>At 2:45 p.m., a U.S. Air Force F-16 fired a sidewinder missile at the objects, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday.
>The Lake Huron object was an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernable payload. The official also said that there is no indication of surveillance capabilities but they cannot rule it out.
I guess it's open season on spy balloons now that they have authorization to shoot them all down.
I suspect both Russia and China were operating different model balloons for different mission types.
What are your guesses on their purpose?
If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
> If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
An interesting theory, although I would be at least a little worried if secure facilities did not already have some form detection of signals they do not expect.
OTOH, you could instead have something gathering data, and the passing balloon could send a signal to the listening device(s), and then quickly dump+relay the data collected over time.
And balloons have the option to loiter longer than say a satellite or other means.
I assumed they were doing some sort of RF monitoring more than the photo type monitoring.
A lot of the comments focus on "Why would they use balloons when they have satellites?" But the reality is they are cheaper, can be oriented inexpensively and can loiter. Not to mention the lower radar signal and other detection issues (made clear by the revelation that this has been going on for a while).
Now that launching/steering balloons is down to the hobbyist level...it seems a larger corp or state actor could easily use them in a way that seemed impossible 30 years ago.
At least WRT the first balloon that kicked off all of this hubbub, NYTimes report that the State Department have disclosed it was "equipped with an antenna meant to pinpoint the locations of communications devices and was capable of intercepting calls made on those devices": https://www.nytimes.com/article/chinese-spy-balloon-mission....
Isnt this the 4th incident in like a week? Seems like its actually a routine occurence but the media is choosing to fixate/overreport it after the spy baloon.
Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line
I think policy shifted. I think overflights by balloons are routine. See as evidence reporting that the balloon that started this news cycle was number 4 in the past handful of years, but after the media attention a decision was made to have more of a zero tolerance policy
My understanding was that we may have been filtering these objects out as noise of our sensor arrays, and only just started listening more closely for smaller anomalies.
It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.
My money says yes, these are routine events. I don't blame the media, though, not directly. I blame the warmongers that have been pushing the anti-China line, starting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
It could be a test but is there any doubt worldwide that, of all branches of the US military, the US Air Force is the last thing you want to tangle with?
Readit News
The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response.
I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.
The American spy/military program involving Low Earth Orbit satellites is a potential target. SpaceX is launching tons of these satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
I know amateur's are involved in meteorology, aircraft tracking, even spotting asteroids and meteors. It would be awesome to have something pointing up all day with software on the back end — pinging you if a small object traverses its CCD.
The counter position is the idea that these have negligible benefit over satellites, so it is irrelevant. However, why send them if they don’t add new capabilities beyond satellites?
Can't balloons be punctured by something less expensive than a stinger? Maybe a drone with a machine gun?
And that leads to the conspiracy that there's someone already has a balloon defense system ready for the inevitable bid.
Using guns against high-altitude balloons is also challenging just from an aerodynamics standpoint. Stall speeds get pretty high up around FL600 even with large wings, so the airplane would have to fly straight at the target with a high closure rate in order to get within effective gun range. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using a guided missile is much safer.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weather-balloon-canada-chin...
Who knows how many of the thousand rounds actually hit the thing.
I wonder if someone might start filling them with much cheaper hydrogen... what's the cost of all that helium anyway?
Goodyear blimp costs about $100k in helium.
Modern incendiary and explosive rounds fired by fighter jets aren't effective against them becayse they are only triggered by their impact against a hard target, but I'm sure the DoD could come up with a more effective version pretty quickly if it came down to that.
Occam's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)
> when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires fewest assumptions
Occam's razor would say that this is the first time we've noticed a balloon over the US, so we shot it down. Believing that there is an unspoken agreement between the US and China to allow a certain amount of spying and we're only taking a hard stance because the Chinese fucked up and got their balloon noticed by civilians has far more assumptions baked into it.
----
To be clear, I'm not saying the theory presented by OP is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not backed by Occam's Razor.
Another theory I heard is that they're poking the US to see what responses would be employed, how quickly detection happens, the radio signal / signals intelligence environment, etc.
Space is regarded similarly to international waters. Spy satellites are free to overfly countries.
He's claiming they're all balloons, and that recovering them has been an intelligence windfall for the US - and Schumer would be in a position to know that. Then again, Schumer has seemed to have an obvious anti-China bias in recent years.
These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down. Instead of manning AWACS and defending them, China could flood the airspace with thousands of these balloons and it would be too expensive to take them all down with our current technology.
By publicizing the F22 mission to shoot that balloon down, we kind of showed our hand and it's a really bad hand. Hence the obfuscating language now being used by officials on the matter.
Besides, no one's going to run out of missiles, balloons, or money before this escalates in another fashion. This is a rather short stage, not an indefinite future.
Eg, retaliation in kind.
There's zero difference, as said balloons could have any manner of nefarious purpose. Chemical/bacterial/viral, or just plain spying, airspace is airspace, protecting it is a thing, and China has the bad hand now.
What they were/are doing is well thought out, and technically a good way to spy. But the political aspect shows (again) just how poorly China understands the West.
To burn so much political capital, over so little gain, is immensely stupid, a diplomat's nightmare, and completely incompetent.
I feel for China, I do. A huge chip exists on its shoulder, it spent centuries bowing to the West. The betrayal during WWII likely still stings.
So it wants to flex, to be the big man, to strut its feathers, but wings made of wax only take you so far...
Not convinced this is true for the large balloon. The helium alone will have cost 6 figures, which is comparable to the cost of the flight time of the F-22.
Also, it's not like the US has a shortage of F-22s and air to air missiles.
The US can retaliate in other ways, sanctions, actually bombing China or perhaps the factory making these, going to war, etc.
The US can also easily develop a weapons platform to destroy these balloons.
Did you mean “agenda” or “strategy” or “vision”? It is possible to see the CCP as an opponent that should be mitigated without distorting one’s thinking.
Another group at my school did actually end up picking the weather balloon project and it landed in a tree in Amish country in Pennsylvania after having been launched from northern VA (somewhat ironically, it was the only tree in a wide open farm of dozens of acres). I wonder how many hobby weather balloons there are up there every day?
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae0655,ae11e6
https://www.flightradar24.com/BLOCKED/2f2cec50
Edit, Nope, just a guy flying to Sault St. Marie with his transponder misconfigured ;)
Which is correct?
* The balloons/objects are well known by intelligence agencies and generally tolerated for strategic reasons, but then one becomes visible to the naked eye by the general public, and the agencies must suddenly respond and pretend it's a brand new threat, because the news cycle operates on simplistic headlines. OR
* This is an entirely new and surprising development, and now intelligence agencies are aggressively scanning airspace for more of these objects and taking them down.
* These balloons/objects can't actually provide useful intelligence for China, but by sending them as sacrificial lambs and eliciting a military response, it sets the precedent for China to do the same for any US intrusion on their airspace. (This one could be combined with either of the above two)
* The timing of these balloons corresponds to other intelligence happenings that the general public doesn't know about - i.e., there is something happening in the intelligence space between the US and China, and these balloons signal some message that the intelligence agencies of the US understand, but which the public does not know about. But, again, the news cycle and the voting public demands a response to what they understand, and they do not accept "Trust us, we're handling it behind the scenes" as an answer. End result, you get an F-22 shooting down a balloon, in a highly visible operation. It's unclear if this demonstration was directed more at China or for the voting public.
One final note - we're talking about intelligence warfare between massively powerful nation states, which makes it tempting to theorize and hypothesis like I just did above. But possibly there is nothing much to think about, and the truth is exactly as it seems: China sent some balloons in a spy program of unknown scope, possibly to elicit this response or possibly not, and it became a political mishap for the current administration so it was forced to respond in a public display. And now the event has more implications for US political pundits and news cycles than it ever did for intelligence warfare between these two countries.
There was one for MT yesterday evening as well.
Looks like it's over Lake Huron now?
>At 2:45 p.m., a U.S. Air Force F-16 fired a sidewinder missile at the objects, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday.
>The Lake Huron object was an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernable payload. The official also said that there is no indication of surveillance capabilities but they cannot rule it out.
…
https://abc7chicago.com/lake-michigan-flight-restrictions-ai...
I suspect both Russia and China were operating different model balloons for different mission types.
What are your guesses on their purpose?
If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
An interesting theory, although I would be at least a little worried if secure facilities did not already have some form detection of signals they do not expect.
OTOH, you could instead have something gathering data, and the passing balloon could send a signal to the listening device(s), and then quickly dump+relay the data collected over time.
A lot of the comments focus on "Why would they use balloons when they have satellites?" But the reality is they are cheaper, can be oriented inexpensively and can loiter. Not to mention the lower radar signal and other detection issues (made clear by the revelation that this has been going on for a while).
Now that launching/steering balloons is down to the hobbyist level...it seems a larger corp or state actor could easily use them in a way that seemed impossible 30 years ago.
Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line
It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.
Key thing is to let it play out and not get freaked out by theatrical political people.