More on the Chinese balloon US overflight

NT1440 said:
From a speculation standpoint, this balloon was never supposed to be over the US in the first place. It was sucked down here by the broken jet stream (polar vortex).

IF it’s indeed a spy balloon, my money is on surveillance of the Arctic where all the “Great powers” have been setting up gear because we’ve identified new shipping lanes that are opening up because of global warming.

We’re there, Russia is there, other NATO members are keeping an eye on the situation up there.

The size of the boom itself doesn’t disturb me, because as you laid out there are physical antenna characteristics that’s need to be in place to allow for world-spanning communications to occur.

This PowerPoint from middle schoolers making these kinds of balloons in miniature shows that this really isn’t stuff that’s outside the capabilities of just regular people. Sometimes a weather ballon is just a balloon.

I’d like to see evidence of the actual equipment, not speculation on it, before I make a definitive conclusion on what this balloon actually was doing, but again it wasn’t even supposed to be over the US except for the fact that we (humanity) have broken how the jet stream operates due to our pollution.
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If the balloon does have the hardware to record radio communications and send info bank to the homeland, I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s a not a weather balloon. And if it was a weather balloon that had flow off course, China might have rung up and let us know, thus avoiding much of the severity of this international incident.

In the US and I imagine most other reasonable countries, such balloons are mandated to have essentially have a self destruct mechanism- and I believe a secondary backup to that so that if the balloon goes off course, they can pop the balloon so it will fall out of the sky.

If it was a spy slob and it’s intended target was to overfly the target, you’d think they’d also have a self destruct mechanism and operate it before they got into US territory, again with the interest of avoiding problems.

I guess the bigger question is when did we really detect the first ballon. Somehow we know that the last military missed multiple balloons. It’s not unheard of that air defense to be caught flat footed in real life or in war games, even when the objects are theoretically far more recognizable aircraft. And I imagine our radars aren’t typically tuned to track slow moving balloons.

That said, it’s pretty unlikely China would start a war with the US relying on high altitude balloons as a means of weapons delivery. That’s what they have ICBM’s for.

And while any not immediately recognized incursion into our airspace is a failure of our defense, let’s not pretend China has carried out extremely successful intelligence operations against the US. The balloon flying across the US is probably the least of our worries.
 
Cmaier said:
U.S. just shot down something else near Alaska. Sounds balloon-like, but nothing confirmed yet.

40,000 ft altitude. Size of small car. Unmanned.
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Musk's Tesla Roadster launched into orbit five years ago is finally succumbing to gravity?

Edit: Ooops. Never mind, that's orbiting the Sun.
 
AG_PhamD said:
I guess the bigger question is when did we really detect the first ballon. Somehow we know that the last military missed multiple balloons
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I suspect it's dismissed, rather than missed - possibly believing they were real weather balloons. Still, such a mischaracterization isn't good. Just a guess.
 
AG_PhamD said:
If the balloon does have the hardware to record radio communications and send info bank to the homeland, I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s a not a weather balloon. And if it was a weather balloon that had flow off course, China might have rung up and let us know, thus avoiding much of the severity of this international incident.

In the US and I imagine most other reasonable countries, such balloons are mandated to have essentially have a self destruct mechanism- and I believe a secondary backup to that so that if the balloon goes off course, they can pop the balloon so it will fall out of the sky.

If it was a spy slob and it’s intended target was to overfly the target, you’d think they’d also have a self destruct mechanism and operate it before they got into US territory, again with the interest of avoiding problems.

I guess the bigger question is when did we really detect the first ballon. Somehow we know that the last military missed multiple balloons. It’s not unheard of that air defense to be caught flat footed in real life or in war games, even when the objects are theoretically far more recognizable aircraft. And I imagine our radars aren’t typically tuned to track slow moving balloons.

That said, it’s pretty unlikely China would start a war with the US relying on high altitude balloons as a means of weapons delivery. That’s what they have ICBM’s for.

And while any not immediately recognized incursion into our airspace is a failure of our defense, let’s not pretend China has carried out extremely successful intelligence operations against the US. The balloon flying across the US is probably the least of our worries.
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Self destruct weather balloons? Is that actually a thing?

Also, I know this angle hasn’t really been discussed, but what are peoples understanding of how high a country’s airspace goes? It’s not internationally recognized that the air above a country’s land is their airspace all the way to space. From the digging I’ve done there doesn’t seem to be an actual answer out there. Some news stories have cited an atmospheric layer as the boundary, but their mistaken because that’s a scientific boundary, not one enshrined in law anywhere.
 
NT1440 said:
Self destruct weather balloons? Is that actually a thing?
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Maybe not in those terms, but generally you want to be able to bring these down in a controlled way. Either to keep it out of places where it might be shot down (say, a commercial balloon staying out of military airspace), or so it comes down where you can retrieve the payload. Since it can be as simple as venting the lifting gas, and you want that ability for multiple reasons, it's not hard to ditch a balloon somewhere before it becomes a problem.

NT1440 said:
Also, I know this angle hasn’t really been discussed, but what are peoples understanding of how high a country’s airspace goes? It’s not internationally recognized that the air above a country’s land is their airspace all the way to space. From the digging I’ve done there doesn’t seem to be an actual answer out there. Some news stories have cited an atmospheric layer as the boundary, but their mistaken because that’s a scientific boundary, not one enshrined in law anywhere.
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There isn't, and to some extent international law can only be enforced through nations agreeing to play ball as it is anyhow, which probably contributes to this being rather fuzzy in the first place.
 
Nycturne said:
Maybe not in those terms, but generally you want to be able to bring these down in a controlled way. Either to keep it out of places where it might be shot down (say, a commercial balloon staying out of military airspace), or so it comes down where you can retrieve the payload. Since it can be as simple as venting the lifting gas, and you want that ability for multiple reasons, it's not hard to ditch a balloon somewhere before it becomes a problem.



There isn't, and to some extent international law can only be enforced through nations agreeing to play ball as it is anyhow, which probably contributes to this being rather fuzzy in the first place.
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I understand (and agree) with the logic of wanting that level of control in ballon management, but from a rather quick search it appears that most weather balloons simply pop. Once they get past a certain altitude due to less atmospheric pressure the gas within expands past the breaking point for the balloon. That’s for a standard ho-hum meteorological ballon.


For the longer term scientific and military style balloons maybe there are actually regulations regarding end of life?

This seems like the kind of fact that was easy to look up on a search engine 10+ years ago before they became advertising and entertainment/news first algorithms.
 
Every outlet is reporting that they've recovered and know that it was surveillance equipment from this balloons payload. It's one thing to say you'll blow it off, it's another to deny the facts. The "yellow cake" comparison has nothing to do with this, I keep seeing it brought up but it's apples and oranges. We are not talking about creating an excuse to invade anyone here, we're simply taking them to task for overtly spying on our country.
 
Nycturne said:
I think it depends how you intend to bounce the signal. Since you won’t have line of sight, you either need to bounce it off the atmosphere or a satellite. Caching data and sending it via satellite during regular windows generally seems easier these days. You can put your big dish on the satellite and ground station and keep things more manageable on the balloon.
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Really how hard would it be for them to have a van following the balloon? At 60,000' the LOS would be 100's of miles.
 
Eric said:
Every outlet is reporting that they've recovered and know that it was surveillance equipment from this balloons payload. It's one thing to say you'll blow it off, it's another to deny the facts. The "yellow cake" comparison has nothing to do with this, I keep seeing it brought up but it's apples and oranges. We are not talking about creating an excuse to invade anyone here, we're simply taking them to task for overtly spying on our country.
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They’re facts because every news source has repeated what officials have said? Do we have any evidence, or just the claims of what was found? Are we to just take the word of intelligence agencies wholesale every time because news agencies have repeated, sorry, “reported” what those agencies have claimed?

Are we going to get any technical information, or is this game of telephone now how facts are determined?

As far as overtly spying. We run entire bases in Australia, Taiwan, and other areas around China, with the explicit purpose of capturing Chinese intelligence.
www.nytimes.com

An American Spy Base Hidden in Australia’s Outback (Published 2017)

The trials of six Christian antiwar protesters have put a spotlight on a facility that the United States would rather keep in the shadows.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

thediplomat.com

Taiwan, Asia’s Secret Air Power

A look at what Taiwan is doing to ensure its air defense and why it matters for the United States and the region.
thediplomat.com

How is a person to determine which of these is more worthy of Pearl clutching? A balloon that may have limited intelligence value, or a collection of entire bases surrounding your country with spying equipment?

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Without being blindly aligned with what happens to be someone’s home country, how would this balloon operation be considered even serious compared to billions in spying equipment and entire bases dedicated to that spying? Am I to be morally outraged that China potentially has used balloons and just ignore the real world facts of my country’s total encirclement of the Chinese nation with military hardware in additional to massive spying operations?

Besides the fact I happen to be American, why am I to believe that China’s sins are somehow greater outrage inducing than the outright evil acts I’ve seen in my own lifetime? Why am I supposed to be outraged even if I believed that this balloon thing was legit? Because America?

We also have our own ballon program, anyone worried about the Balloon Gap rest assured.
From July: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/...pon-against-china-and-russia-hot-air-00043860
www.lockheedmartin.com

Sentinels of the Sky: The Persistent Threat Detection System

From afar, it looked like a scene straight out of an H. G. Wells novel. In 2003, a series of blimp-shaped air vehicles began rising, one after another, over the arid terrain of Afghanistan.
www.lockheedmartin.com www.lockheedmartin.com
 
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NT1440 said:
How is a person to determine which of these is more worthy of Pearl clutching? A balloon that may have limited intelligence value, or a collection of entire bases surrounding your country with spying equipment?
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When I‘m pooping, I‘m more concerned about the dude sticking his head over the top of the partition and looking in at me than I am about the guys in the neighboring stalls listening in.
 
NT1440 said:
Without being blindly aligned with what happens to be someone’s home country, how would this balloon operation be considered even serious compared to billions in spying equipment and entire bases dedicated to that spying?
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I've already explained why up above, multiple times.

Collecting broad area signals of interest on a massive scale, lets say just for example cellphone signals/conversations (hundreds/thousands at a time), with typical handset RF outputs of 2-3 watts, from space, whether LEO or geosynchronous/semi-synchronus orbits, would be impossible for China. The distance is too great for such low power signals over a wide geographic area.

Designing a collection system hanging from a balloon operating at 60,000 feet altitude that could soak-up and geolocate, as an example, every single cellphone signal/conversation in a city simultaneously, and then characterize and record such transmissions (content/data/location), for later uploading to a satellite in view would be pretty easy. And that's not limited to cellphones (an example), but other low-power signals of interest in and around US bases and other government facilities around the US that would have tremendous value to an adversary. Once more...collecting low power signals of interest at 60,000 feet is far far easier than collecting low power signals of interest from 100 to 23,000 miles

The base referenced in your NYT story is a joint American/Australian base. It has nothing to do with spying on America. We're talking about what China can do with balloons.
 
Herdfan said:
Really how hard would it be for them to have a van following the balloon? At 60,000' the LOS would be 100's of miles.
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Why even risk the assets though?

NT1440 said:
I understand (and agree) with the logic of wanting that level of control in ballon management, but from a rather quick search it appears that most weather balloons simply pop. Once they get past a certain altitude due to less atmospheric pressure the gas within expands past the breaking point for the balloon. That’s for a standard ho-hum meteorological ballon.
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Which makes sense, since the parachute is enough to recover the simple and cheap payload, and the payload is somewhat expendable if a finder doesn’t return it. Those balloons aren’t meant for operating over any real chunk of time.

But Occam’s Razor to me suggests this thing had altitude control due to the flight length. Unless the goal was to launch a long term mission with a super pressure balloon with no way to keep it any where near the target allocation.

NT1440 said:
For the longer term scientific and military style balloons maybe there are actually regulations regarding end of life?
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I won’t go into the details on control again, but the techniques are as old as airships. Modern tech lets us understand the stratospheric air currents better for steering and computer systems make remote control feasible, but the concept of ballast and gas release to slip into air currents going the way you want isn’t new.

Once you add altitude control for longer, more controlled flight, you have a lot more control on when/where to terminate the flight.
 
NT1440 said:
Self destruct weather balloons? Is that actually a thing?

Also, I know this angle hasn’t really been discussed, but what are peoples understanding of how high a country’s airspace goes? It’s not internationally recognized that the air above a country’s land is their airspace all the way to space. From the digging I’ve done there doesn’t seem to be an actual answer out there. Some news stories have cited an atmospheric layer as the boundary, but their mistaken because that’s a scientific boundary, not one enshrined in law anywhere.
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Flight termination system would be a more appropriate term. Your not look for an Michael Bay explosion, just for the balloon to pop so it will hopefully fall to the ground in a safe area and before it’s unwanted course becomes dangerous.

Per FAR 101.35 which includes unmanned balloons:
(a) No person may operate an unmanned free balloon unless -
(1) It is equipped with at least two payload cut-down systems or devices that operate independently of each other;
(2) At least two methods, systems, devices, or combinations thereof, that function independently of each other, are employed for terminating the flight of the balloon envelope; and
(3) The balloon envelope is equipped with a radar reflective device(s) or material that will present an echo to surface radar operating in the 200 MHz to 2700 MHz frequency range.
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Federal Register :: Request Access

www.ecfr.gov

This is more about balloon legislation than anyone ever cared to know about.

According to most US agencies, space starts around 80km or just over 260,000ft. According to just about everyone else in the world it’s at the Karman Line, 100k ft.

It’s my understanding there really is no agreement of up to what altitude a country can consider their airspace. It seems like the accepted rule of time is that things that are in orbit around the earth are considered in space not in one’s airspace. Anything that’s not in orbit, like an airplane or balloon, must be in the atmosphere and therefore being in one’s airspace.
 
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Citysnaps said:
I suspect it's dismissed, rather than missed - possibly believing they were real weather balloons. Still, such a mischaracterization isn't good. Just a guess.
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Perhaps. I dug into this a little bit. Apparently balloons are not required to have transponders but they do have to have radar reflectors. The ones that do have transponders often only periodically transmit. Basically, the operator is supposed to inform local ATC and the FAA so they can issue a NOTAM. The operator has to track the balloon and if it deviates or is off schedule, that must be reported. It seems like most unmanned balloons are operating above 60k feet, so that’s not going to be an issue for commercial traffic except for when taking off and landing.

Obviously with the Chinese balloon, the ATC would probably not be looking out for balloons- of it was launched under the cover of someone else’s planned balloon launch. I’m sure it didn’t have a radar reflector and ATC often doesn’t rely on radar. Considering the balloon is at 60k feet and probably traveling at 65mph tops, it may not even appear on their radar. Similar story with the military, it’s so high and slow and with such a small radar return not having a reflector, it probably doesn’t fit the profile of the typical threat ie Russian bombers coming towards Alaska. So indeed, it could have been initially disregarded or assumed to be operating as balloons should with the FAA or assumed to be some sort of weather phenomena or radar anomaly.

I’m not convinced we’ll ever be told the series of events. At best, they won’t want to share their methods and weaknesses, at worst they won’t share what exactly happened because someone messed up and they don’t want the public embarrassment.
 
AG_PhamD said:
Perhaps. I dug into this a little bit. Apparently balloons are not required to have transponders but they do have to have radar reflectors. The ones that do have transponders often only periodically transmit. Basically, the operator is supposed to inform local ATC and the FAA so they can issue a NOTAM. The operator has to track the balloon and if it deviates or is off schedule, that must be reported. It seems like most unmanned balloons are operating above 60k feet, so that’s not going to be an issue for commercial traffic except for when taking off and landing.

Obviously with the Chinese balloon, the ATC would probably not be looking out for balloons- of it was launched under the cover of someone else’s planned balloon launch. I’m sure it didn’t have a radar reflector and ATC often doesn’t rely on radar. Considering the balloon is at 60k feet and probably traveling at 65mph tops, it may not even appear on their radar. Similar story with the military, it’s so high and slow and with such a small radar return not having a reflector, it probably doesn’t fit the profile of the typical threat ie Russian bombers coming towards Alaska. So indeed, it could have been initially disregarded or assumed to be operating as balloons should with the FAA or assumed to be some sort of weather phenomena or radar anomaly.

I’m not convinced we’ll ever be told the series of events. At best, they won’t want to share their methods and weaknesses, at worst they won’t share what exactly happened because someone messed up and they don’t want the public embarrassment.
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Outside of balloon launches being detected by other sources and methods, what should have detected it would be the Cobra Dane 100' diameter planar phased array radar at the end of the Aleutian Islands - assuming there's enough metallic matter in the craft to create reflections.

The most recent balloon with its 100+ foot boom, solar panels, antennas, electronics, batteries, etc likely had enough metal to create a good reflection, and thus detection (assuming relatively low velocity events are not filtered out). That radar, along with others that are similar, were designed to detect ICBM launches from the USSR/Russia (both missile development tests re-entering near Kamchatka, and of course the real thing targeting the US mainland).

But...if the previous balloons did not have the long boom and payload (and thus little reflective metal), and were just trial runs to test detection responses from the US, that *could* be why they were missed. Just some conjecture....
 
NT1440 said:
Does it disturb anyone that forums posts on this site are doing more fact checking and digging into technical details/possibilities than any news source covering this story?
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I've already met with the Chinese Ambassador and handed him a letter protesting the overflights on behalf of the United States. He in turn expressed deep regrets and promised it won't happen again.
 

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