This and the previous thread on this subject have highlighted some interesting(?) things, at least for me:
* The IT community, despite the majority being some form of an intellectual, has either a flawed (read: Hollywood) or no understanding of physics or military aviation.
* The IT community, despite the majority being some form of an intellectual, has a patently insufficient understanding of how sovereignty, diplomacy, and laws work.
* The Chinese apologists are hilarious to witness, particularly the ones who believe two wrongs make a right.
First time? Basically any not-directly-IT domain gets talked about this way. Hell, even times where topics like Health and Nutrition come up you find a lot of wildly inaccurate statements being made here.
I think the problem is too many people see themselves as the type of generalist Intellectual when they shouldn't.
I completely agree. One fun thing about HN though, is that every once in a while an expert from an obscure domain drops in with an extraordinary comment. It is rare, but delightful when it happens.
Ah, I used to call it the “school teacher’s disease”. People spend their whole days in environments where they are indisputable experts, then they carry their patronising attitude elsewhere.
even times where topics like Health and Nutrition come up you find a lot of wildly inaccurate statements being made
On hackernews alt-med is repackaged as "biohacking" (sic!) and suddenly injecting yourself with home-made concoctions because you've read some research that some stuff had some effect in vivo or you came up with it yourself after reading wikipedia is lauded as next frontier of medicine or transhumanism come home.
I mean, that's every non-IT topic in an IT forum. It's to be expected from all forums really. Everyone has blind spots about other professions.
I think the key is to treat off-topic threads like watercooler talk, friends shooting the shit with each other and enjoy the drama.
I'm sorry but I gotta laugh at "despite the majority being some form of an intellectual", as if that is worth something. If you don't have the experience and the domain knowledge, can you call yourself an intellectual in that domain?
The thing is the IT community should know better. You know what goes in airplanes and missiles? Computers.
Not understanding how high 60,000 feet (roughly 18km) is is embarassing when you're an engineer of some description.
This phenomenon is something I've noticed with other subjects too; like a lot of the IT community not understanding how life works outside of cities when we talk about transport and infrastructure.
IT professionals affect the world in very significant ways with their engineering, but they also seem like some of the most naive/ignorant people I know of. I'm greatly interested in why this seems so.
> but they also seem like some of the most naive/ignorant people I know of. I'm greatly interested in why this seems so.
It’s the arrogance associated with it. A kind of “I understand this complicated thing (computers) so everything else is trivial to me”. To learn something, you need the humility to say “I don’t understand”.
There is likely a selection bias at work here. Anyone who correctly identifies that they lack the domain knowledge to leave a well informed comment will not post. So most posts will naturally be by the uninformed or arrogant, but we have no idea what the ratio between these two groups is because people who dont post are impossible to count.
> "despite the majority being some form of an intellectual", as if that is worth something.
I think I would phrase that as "despite the majority thinking of themselves some form of an intellectual, outside of their domain, they are out often out their depth and unaware of it".
> If you don't have the experience and the domain knowledge, can you call yourself an intellectual in that domain?
Yeah, that's the thing. You can assume that "in that domain" is irrelevant, and call yourself an intellectual, period. You can and you'd be wrong, very wrong, but you wouldn't be alone. It's common.
When I call myself an intellectual, it is mostly a form of pride or vanity.
As a boy, I read Ender's Game and Zhuge Liang's commentaries on The Art of War. As a man, I like to imagine that I now know enough to keep the whole world safe from catastrophic war. It is a comforting illusion.
It's not uncommon to find people on HN who are "in the room" when top-level decisions are being made in healthcare, defense, finance, etc
That's different from when an Oncologist forum is discussing SEC actions or an Accounting forum is discussing laser-guided munitions... or at least it might be different: you rarely know on HN who is speaking from direct knowledge.
And if it's about defense or proprietary information then HNers with knowledge will lurk but not participate.
I work at NASA. We had a big review meeting for a space brayton (turbine engine) concept. One manager-level engineer absolutely thought that the spinning rotor would apply a constant torque to the spacecraft that would have to be constantly counteracted. I tried and failed to explain conservation of angular momentum to him.
I studied physics and it always surprises me how many good engineers really don’t have a very good intuitive understanding of basic physics principles like conservation laws.
I’m just checking my intuition here. An accelerating or decelerating rotor would apply an angular force (first derivative), while a constant rotation would not?
I'm confused... you are right that it takes no additional torque to keep a frictionless rotor rotating at the same angular velocity, but in the real world there is friction and air resistance where you have to keep applying torque to keep something spinning at the same rate. and if you are applying torque to someone, then that thing is applying an equal and opposite torque back... is it not?
> if you are applying torque to someone, then that thing is applying an equal and opposite torque back
Yes, just like with a force.
> but in the real world there is friction and air resistance where you have to keep applying torque to keep something spinning at the same rate
Yes, but I think you are forgetting one thing: If the friction is between the rotor and the body, then this friction does not only act on the rotor, but also on the body. I.e. the friction creates a pair of torques which the engine can perfectly counteract with it's own pair of torques.
If the friction is between the rotor and the air, then yes, the spacecraft needs some kind of counteraction or it will start turning.
I suspect that the engineer in the GP's story might not remember the equations for angular acceleration, but has an intuitive sense that if a spinning something is in contact with a non-spinning something, you need a good reason for why some of the energy won't get transferred from the former to the latter.
Yes and no. The torque in helicopter is primarily a side effect of power being applied to the rotor. When a helicopter auto rotates (such as after an engine failure), the pilot has to remove anti torque forces with the pedals. This remains true even when you change pitch to slow your descent to the ground. So as long as no power is being applied, if you are in a free descent with a constant rotation on your rotor, then no, you will not need anti torque.
No, because the main router isn’t applying a pure downward thrust. It’s also moving air in the direction of rotation. A turbine has internal baffles and the ducting itself to direct the air in one direction (?)
You would think given the situation they'd say "no comment". It's incumbent on China given that they violated US airspace to not make the situation worse. They have to know that it is an impossible situation for the US to back down in. They're basically ensuring we get locked into an escalation cycle.
Edit: And by loosening their censorship on nationalist commentators to say incendiary things means neither side has any room to maneuver. It's like adding in dynamite.
Then why would we assume they want anything other than an escalation cycle? Didn't foreign orders fall by some massive amount over the past year? One narrative for why the Chinese people tolerate their totalitarian dictatorship is the economic growth and prosperity they believe that it has bought them.
This is not likely to remain constant given the above, and thus the tolerance of the totalitarian dictatorship is similarly unlikely to remain constant, and what does a dictator with a slipping grip on power want to shore it up? A nice foreign skirmish.
If this cycle gets momentum, with the war in Ukraine going on, there is no way to control where it goes. It's the ultimate gamble. I thought they would be more careful than to roll the iron dice.
If you're a one man dictator shop and you're guaranteed to lose unless you roll, I guess you roll. To hell with the collateral damage, if you cared about that you wouldn't be a dicator to begin with.
Beware, because this is basically the case on every non-software topic here. I come for the entertaining takes from smart people trying to get it right. They often don’t. The moment the scales fell from my eyes was at a former company where several engineers were talking about their essential oil remedies.
>* The IT community, despite the majority being some form of an intellectual
That's your first error. Any trade can encompass a swath of subjects and nuances from history to technology, niche technique and even underlying mathematics thousands of years old, including those that built the floor your chair is on right now, but you'd probably drive by a construction site thinking the mouth breathers are right where big brother market sorted their 'intellect' to.
I think that why choose a missile over guns is a legitimate question.
As the author also later finds out, and only suggests it, perhaps using guns might have also worked, but just seems riskier because the proximity to the baloon (for the aircraft) and terminal velocity of bullets (though the baloon was shot down over safe airspace)?
I don’t see how expertise at using the latest javascript framework to serve advertising makes you an intellectual. If I feel I have too much karma and need a few downvotes, all I need to do is post something correct about physics or mathematics that’s even slightly counterintuitive. It never fails.
...is full of rather ignorant people who see themselves as "very smart" and therefore foolishly talk like they are an expert or near-expert in any area, especially after they've spent a half-hour reading Wikipedia or read some popular-audience book.
IMHO, it's generally the best policy to assume that an expert or conventional wisdom in another field is more correct than whatever "fatal flaw" you can think of in 30 seconds to form an internet comment. The main caveat to that is when political or ideological conflict is at play, no one should feel they need to defer to an expert's ideology or favored political policy choices.
Otherwise accurate, I can only object to your use of this phrase as intentionally vague when you could easily have been more specific and accurate: it is only software developers, apparently, that know everything. Network Engineers, DBAs, Systems Administrators, Tier II and Help Desk Technicians do not behave this way, but generally approach problems from a synthetic perspective of ignorance rather than knowing everything there is to know a priori. Developers are creators, gods among men.
The subject does not matter, intelligence and other cognitive capacities do not matter, here there or wherever does not matter.
Almost no one ever works from the assumption that they are ignorant regarding a topic, and partially to wholly mistaken about everything to do with it, despite this being true.
Oh no, people are asking "stupid" questions and speculating about things they are not experts on. How terrible - someone might learn something.
> insufficient understanding
Insufficient for what? We are on a discussion forum. It's not like people here will have perfect knowledge about IT topics either, not to mention that there could be multiple correct actions/decisions besides the one that the expers have chosen.
We should be encouraging more critical discussion, not shaming people for daring to ask questions.
> * The Chinese apologists are hilarious to witness, particularly the ones who believe two wrongs make a right.
No need to be apologetic about a $1 trillion project shooting down a fricking balloon. At least the Soviets were sensible enough to let Mathias Rust land his airplane close to the Kremlin.
No, you don't seem to understand. Having used the F-22 in "combat", the program is used up. Now we'll need to play another card to deal with another threat. The balloon was just to tank our defenses. That's why you always build small disposable defenses as well as expensive ones. Our radars were all tapped tracking a balloon! How can we withstand even a bomber run now?
Shooting down one balloon demonstrated all the capabilities of the F-22? Doubt it. the F-15 has seen combat for almost 50 years and we’re still flying it, quite successfully too. I’m sure there are classified planes with greater capabilities than the F-22, and that money has already been spent, so China has to try harder to get the US to deploy its classified weaponry.
> No, you don't seem to understand. Having used the F-22 in "combat", the program is used up.
The US could have strategically used that $1 trillion on its human resources, on things like school and healthcare for all, that way they wouldn't have had a 25% deficit in recruiting personnel (last I've checked). But, hey, building an airplane that can shoot down balloons for the same amount of money I guess also works.
Yeah, I know about the opportunity costs of dissuasion ("nobody is going to attack us if we've got a $1 trillion airplane"), but, again, in the great and long-term strategic scheme of things looks like that was the wrong choice for the US.
Somewhere on the internet, Twitter I think, I now see that the official sources give lower figures. Also, most probably according to those figures the war in Afghanistan also didn't cost more than a few hundred million.
What "other problems"? I hate it when people do that, i.e. saying stuff like "you're generally wrong, but I won't say exactly what, because you're so very wrong". Just say what you specifically say you see as wrong or don't say it at all (to be clear, this is not directed particularly at you).
- Whether intentional or not, you imply the entire budget for the F22 program was dedicated to shooting down a single weather balloon.
- Your source for the budget comes from Twitter, and you state without evidence that your sources are probably more accurate than official ones.
- Your posts mock military spending without engaging in the difficult political science questions of what may happen if your suggestions had been implemented. Something as large as defunding air force development has a scope far beyond the question of one weather balloon, and your discussions appears to lack awareness of that scope and complexity.
In short, many of the problems center around twitter-sized sound bytes being played in a venue that prefers well-constructed arguments and well-rounded discussion.
> you're generally wrong, but I won't say exactly what, because you're so very wrong
It's normally actually "there are a number of things wrong here but I don't have the time/energy/motivation to go into them".
That information can still be useful and isn't always just consensus building (which is admittedly a widespread problem).
On an unrelated note, you might want to recheck this: Also, most probably according to those figures the war in Afghanistan also didn't cost more than a few hundred million.
I also suspect the majority of commentators consider your epistemology to be completely broken and fixing that is a time investment far beyond what they can commit to. On the remote chance you'd actually interested in fixing it, the Less Wrong one (Sequences) might be very flawed, but HN will agree its better than what you've currently got.
Twitter is just wrong. The total for the entire program, including 40 years of maintance, is estimated to be around $133 billion (in constant dollars from a few years ago). The amount spent so far is under $100 billion.
Guns on planes are deliberately made to spray over a certain area to increase the odds of a kill, which is good when you're in a fight to the death and you're all out of other options, which is the scenario the gun was made for. Using guns here would risk damaging the payload which they want to recover for study, both to see what exactly was observed and to get a better understanding of the device.
The balloon was brought down with a missile that had the primary explosive removed, it basically just flew through the balloon. This being the F-22's first air-to-air kill after nearly 2 decades in service, it's not like these missiles are a precious resource to be conserved. It also would be quite embarrassing to attempt to shoot down the balloon and fail, so it makes sense to go for a guaranteed kill.
Finally, it should be noted that the balloon was at approximately 60,000 ft. The F-22's flight ceiling is above 50,000 ft, but the exact value is classified. It is possible that the F-22 simply could not get up high enough to engage with guns even if that was desirable, or it's also possible that the F-22 is capable of flying that high but the US did not want to confirm that to a potential foreign adversary. In general it is also just good practice to keep some distance between your most capable assets and foreign espionage devices.
As one can see from video of the encounter, it was very effective in bringing the balloon down in a controlled manner. It's one thing to monday-morning quarterback a failure, but this is ridiculous.
> The balloon was brought down with a missile that had the primary explosive removed
The missile fused and was a normal AIM-9X.
You can see result of the war cranium detonation in the videos as a cloud of black smoke. It's just that things are happening so fast that it looks like the missile just sails right on through.
> This being the F-22's first air-to-air kill after nearly 2 decades in service, it's not like these missiles are a precious resource to be conserved.
The first clause of your sentence here is not logically related to the second clause. These acquisitions programs are separate. While missile purchase quantities are adjusted based on projected needs, it is not as if there is a quantity in inventory earmarked specifically for the F-22 only.
> It is possible that the F-22 simply could not get up high enough to engage with guns even if that was desirable
> You can see result of the war cranium detonation in the videos as a cloud of black smoke.
That's the tiny self destruct fuse going off after it's already gone through the balloon. An AIM-9X actually going off is substantially larger.
> The first clause of your sentence here is not logically related to the second clause. These acquisitions programs are separate. While missile purchase quantities are adjusted based on projected needs, it is not as if there is a quantity in inventory earmarked specifically for the F-22 only.
There is most certainly an inventory of munitions earmarked for the F-22. They are stored on the bases with the F-22, the pilots train with these munitions, if there was a need to deploy them they would deploy with these munitions. They could potentially be used by other planes, but only if they were urgently needed, which was the actual point I was making: these are air-to-air missiles, used only for an aircraft to shoot down another aircraft, something which has been a very rare occurrence for quite some time. Not only was this the first A2A kill for the F22, it was merely the second A2A kill for the US in the 21st century. This lack of aerial combat is the reason why the F-22 has been so rarely used.
Yeah, there isn't any explosion even that large. Perhaps you are mistaking the cloud of vapor as the balloon pops?
Again, the goal was to preserve as much intact as possible, shrapnel production runs completely counter to that objective. I'm basing my comments off this source [0], which admittedly is just some guy on the internet, though I have not been able to find any source claiming the missile carried a munition, if you have one please share it.
> Perhaps you are mistaking the cloud of vapor as the balloon pops?
No. Two clouds are visible. One (white) clearly from the balloon envelope, and one (darker) clearly from the missile. https://imgur.com/a/y386kLU
It's also very clear from the video that they targeted/hit below the balloon's envelope.
> shrapnel production runs completely counter to that objective
So does missing it, and they're already dropping it from 65k feet. They'll be prepared to piece things together.
> I have not been able to find any source claiming the missile carried a munition...
This is a pretty silly inversion of burden of proof. Between "some guy on the internet said something no one else reputable is corroborating" and "the Pentagon typically doesn't use dummy rockets to shoot enemy aircraft down", I know which side I fall on.
Per what I read, the F-22 was operating at 58,000 ft and shot the balloon that was at the time at 65,000 ft. A missile was used because it had to elevate ~7,000 ft to hit the target. The balloon fell in 47 ft of water, 6 mi from the coast.
The closest anyone's come in this thread is "this YouTuber said so".
I don't have a source proving the cop who pulls me over has real bullets in his gun, but it's safe to assume he does, because that's the normal scenario. If you claim he's carrying a water pistol (highly unusual!) burden of proof is on you.
> GEN. VANHERCK: Yeah, absolutely. There was a warhead in the missile. You can see that explosion on TV as it goes through the lower part of the balloon and right there through the superstructure.
I know absolutely nothing about planes and missiles etc. but the "measure thrice, cut once, build in failsafes and leave loads of margin for error" approach seems very plausible for a bureaucratic and highly public organization like the US Army.
Using guns wouldn’t work well because of various interesting aspects of physics. It was tried before on a different balloon and based on that they used a missile. In this situation it was important that the balloon be disabled in one hit and crashed within US territorial waters to avoid bigger headaches. The US regularly patrols just outside a Chinese airspace and for the US to shoot at something outside it’s airspace or have the ballon crash in international waters would open up a whole different can of worms.
Of course it doesn't justify what China did (I wasn't making a "two wrongs make a right" argument) - but it might help explain the thought processes of the Chinese leadership in pulling a stunt like this - I would suspect that they are aware of US overflights over China.
Talk to a diplomat about "precedents". And to someone familiar with current politics in China about the policy of cultivating memories of past indignities, which were suffered at the hands of foreign powers.
If you're opening the can of European/Near Eastern History, the clear record of foreign power atrocities (vs. mere indignities) goes back quite a few millennia further than that.
That was before even Nixon's famous visit when we still had zero diplomatic relations with China, and those drones were completely replaced by satellites, which both the US and China use on each other to this day. Your 50 year old example has zero relevance to today.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
The difference between a baloon and a satellite is pretty massive, and airspace != space. Granted, there is no clear border between those two (the Kármán line is somewhat artificial), but there is a clear difference between orbiting stuff and stuff that needs air in order to fly, and long term behavior of powers that be clearly distinguishes between those two.
I suspect historically it had more to do with capabilities than anything else. If you had the power to shoot it down, you would, and nobody could shoot down a satellite. Of course now, everybody and their brother has satellites and shooting them down would be major bad for everybody involved.
Yes. In practice, your airspace is what you can defend.
This kind of thing has a long history -- the old "three mile limit" for territorial waters had more to do with the maximum range of cannon than it did anything else.
> Interestingly enough there doesn't seem to be an agree vertical extent as to where "airspace" stops
But there is a somewhat shared definition of where space start in the Kármán line at 100km of altitude so it should follow that the vertical airspace stops where space sparts? I might be completely wrong though.
For aviation noobs (like me) wondering how low the balloon would have to be in order for a helicopter to be an option for retrieval:
"The maximum altitude which can be reached during forward flight typically depends on the ability of the engine to breathe the thinner air rather than the rotor's ability to provide lift. Turbine-engine helicopters can reach around 25,000 feet (7,620 meters). But the maximum height at which a helicopter can hover is much lower - a high performance helicopter can hover at 10,400 feet (3,170 meters)."
Is the one on mars able to operate with really thin air because mars has less gravity?
A "balloon retrieval bot" using battery powered propulsion, launched by another platform such as a rocket (or another balloon!) might be a fun thing for someone at raytheon to pitch.
> The planet's atmospheric density is about 1⁄100 that of Earth's at sea level, or about the same as 87,000 ft (27,000 m), an altitude never reached by existing helicopters. This density reduces even more in Martian winters. To keep Ingenuity aloft, its specially shaped blades of enlarged size must rotate between 2400 and 2900 rpm, or about 10 times faster than what is needed on Earth.
Of course that helps, but the whole design was made for it. It's dual rotors were designed for the environment, and rotate at 2500 rpm+ vs 500rpm for a normal helicopter.
In the video (or one of the videos) it looks like the missile hit the base of the balloon, which did pop the balloon but also separated the payload from the balloon without destroying the payload.
Considering that they waited until the balloon was over shallow water it seems like a deliberate, 'surgical' move to seize the payload with minimum damage.
For public consumption this also provided a clean and decisive shoot rather than looking rather ridiculous by shooting rounds at it without necessarily any immediate effects. So a good ending for the President's image.
The fact that they it let cross the country first suggests that it wasn't deemed a threat, though.
From what I've read elsewhere, they were jamming it extensively for most of its trip. In addition, they were using it as an exercise in monitoring and assessing its capabilities. Then it was safely disabled in shallow US waters with no risk of collateral. Seems like it was handled professionally by all involved.
I wanted to joke about this showing the clear need for jet-mounted shotguns, but there is or was probably some multi-million MIC research project about exactly this. (And yes, I read that 1000 holes weren't sufficient. But software architecture rule #1: if brute force didn't work, it just wasn't brute enough.)
Over 4,000 recce balloons had entered their airspace up until the late 1970s and the Soviets compiled statistics that "on average 1.4 guided AAM's, 26 unguided rockets and 112 cannon rounds were used against each [destroyed] balloon"
"Some military analysis also pointed out that the missile may not be equipped with a warhead, and the U.S. military only selected a favorable attack position after monitoring the balloon in the past few days."
The grey cloud is the explosion. Real-life missiles don't look like a Michael Bay movie, and the balloon almost certainly carried no jet fuel for combustion.
What makes you think that comes from a warhead and is not a reaction of the mixed gasses from the missle and balloon? I don’t even known but I suspect a warhead would not even detonate when piercing a balloon
2. Because it doesn't reallly matter; the "how did the missile detonate" question is readily answerable, and all that gas in the balloon is well above the impact site and smoke cloud.
The parent poster expressed disbelief because of an entirely incorrect assumption about how missiles work.
Hydrogen is a more common choice than helium for unmanned balloons. Only 12 of 101 weather balloon launch sites operated by the US's national weather service use helium[1], and that's with unusually cheap helium access in the US. I would expect other countries to use helium even less frequently.
> GEN. VANHERCK: Yeah, absolutely. There was a warhead in the missile. You can see that explosion on TV as it goes through the lower part of the balloon and right there through the superstructure.
I'm not up to date on spy-balloon technology, but what kind of things can they learn using a balloon that they couldn't have learned by using a satellite?
>Now [balloons] are making a comeback, because while spy satellites can see almost everything, balloons equipped with high-tech sensors hover over a site far longer and can pick up radio, cellular and other transmissions that cannot be detected from space. That is why the Montana sighting of the balloon was critical; in recent years, the National Security Agency and United States Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear arsenal, have been remaking communications with nuclear weapons sites. That would be one, but only one, of the natural targets for China’s Ministry of State Security, which oversees many of its national security hacks.
That's a good question. I haven't heard any information one way or the other, and it wouldn't surprise me if the public never learns those kinds of details (or, rather, only learns in 30 years or whenever it gets declassified)
Are there any laser weapons portable enough to use (either on a vehicle or a ship if the balloon is near the cost)?
I have read about lasers that are used against missiles and planes. I imagine that the balloon would be more fragile. Could it be hurt even if the laser has lost energy due to the high altitude?
The YAL-1 with it's Mega Watt laser may have been able to burn a significant hole in the envelope, but it was retired in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
What amazes me is that the distance of 60000ft (20km) is quite short here on earth. You can do it by bicycle in one hour. But if you go vertical, suddenly the rules change. Up there isn't even enough air to power the engines of jets, so the will have to carry an oxigen tank with them. If you go vertical things become difficult really quickly and space starts in vertical direction where the neighboring town is in horizontal direction.
Also, where is the limit when you would call the balloon a satellite? Satellites cross over foreign countries all the time, so there must be a height above which this is not a problem. Is there a fixed threshold for this?
Satellites have to be placed in orbit by definition. To be in orbit at 20km of altitude you'd need to be flying at over 7km/s, so balloons can't argued to be satellites.
As a first approximation: yes. Nobody can pull it down because not even the tallest human is tall enough to reach it. By far. So that is the answer to that.
On the other hand I assume you mean: Is it possible to pull it down with some machine? And the answer is yes, it is possible to pull it down with some machine.
Entirely within the demonstrated abilities of humankind.
If we want to, have enough money and time, we could make a machine which captures it, takes it to Mars, lands it there softly, dances the cha-cha-cha with it there, launches again back to Earth and lands it softly here. Entirely possible. Only a matter of time and money.
It is not a question of impossibility. It is a question of how much time you have (remember it is drifting out of your airspace) and how much money you want to spend on it, and how certain you want to do it, and how safe you want to keep your personal and people on the ground while doing it.
The balloon was very high in the upper atmosphere, above normal commercial airline flight and above the reach of helicopters.
If balloon pulling is a regular occurrence you can set up infrastructure for it. Devise some different approaches and test them to see what works.
If they waited that long, the balloon would have drifted out of US territory and the politics of downing an object over international waters would have been very sketchy. So yes, it's probably possible to engineer a solution to down a balloon using some non-destructive method, but there simply wasn't time to test it out and figure out what works.
It was shot down over shallow water to maximize the amount of wreckage they could study. Also, while international law is clearly on the US side shooting it down, I'm not sure if capturing it intact would be allowed. That might be air piracy or something. I am not an international lawyer.
> I'm not sure if capturing it intact would be allowed. That might be air piracy or something. I am not an international lawyer.
100% baseless speculation here. The US can, effectively, do whatever the hell it wants. Who's gonna tell us no? We invaded multiple sovereign countries over the past few decades and no one stopped us; you think anyone is gonna stop us doing anything to a balloon within our own airspace? And whatever happens afterwards is a matter for diplomacy, not international courts; there's no one who can enforce a ruling against the US (or China) like that. Welcome to the world of sovereign state actors, where might makes right.
I wonder the same thing. I suspect the reason is that the payload is large no heavy and very high up which makes it hard to catch. The US used to catch rolls of film out of the air after they were dropped by satellites, but those were small and had parachutes, which probably made it easier.
Because not blowing it up would mean people would continue asking pesky questions and demanding evidence. But that would take down the real hot air balloon, the narrative.
What I don't understand is why one would opt for an IR (heat seeking) missile, over a radar homing one? In this case the goal - I'm guessing - was to pop the ballon and not damage the payload more than necessary.
Any heat emitted must have been from the payload, so an IR seeker might hit the part you want to keep (the only part emitting any heat at all).
If you believe that the payload was a sophisticated signals investigation platform, sending a radar-homing missile towards it potentially gives your adversary access to information about your missile's capabilities.
I guess. Likely the F-22 radar itself is a better kept secret than the AMRAAM which has existed for a long time and in semi-recent versions in places like Pakistan. So that could be a reason: firing a radar homing missile requires using the plane radar (?) and you'd prefer to avoid that if possible.
What I want to know is: Why publicize this now? It's clear that China's been sending out spy balloons for a few years. (And that we (the US) probably do plenty of our own spying too.)
So what's the real reason for telling the whole world about this and cutting off a diplomatic visit?
That, and not being willing (or able) to stop it makes the president look weak. No president wants that if they can help it, so no president will authorize releasing the information if they can help it.
Yes, jets can fire bullets. There's no reason they wouldn't be able to. Almost all US fighters carry guns. Most carry the M61 Vulcan gatling cannon firing 20mm rounds. The exceptions are the F-35 series. The F-35A, used by the Air Force, carries a GAU-12 Equalizer gatling cannon firing 25mm rounds; the F-35B (the STOVL variant used by the Marine Corps) and the F-35C (used by the Navy) do not carry guns. Guns on fighters have basically the same level of utility as bayonets on assault rifles; that is, not very much.
It's not as important anymore, but pretty much every fighter jet still has a a gun or can carry one on a mount, yes. (commonly 20mm cannon of some kind)
I think you are confused about the difference between fuzing and seeking.
There is no publicly known way to fire an AIM-9X without seeking. It can be fired with out the seeker having a lock and given updated guidance from the launch platform via datalink to direct it towards the target so that it can then acquire the target with its own seeker. Even in BORE mode, the seeker attempts to acquire the target immediately.
The fuze is a set of two separate mechanisms, an active IR laser and photodiodes for the non-contact fuze and a contact fuze.
You have 3 choices: an airplane, a drone, or another balloon.
Airplanes are fast, you can't just approach, slow down, reach out and poke the balloon.
Drones don't fly that high up. On the internet you can find that drones can fly as high as 33000 feet. It's likely the military has drones that fly higher, maybe even as high as this balloon. But you need one that flies that high, and also has the capability to puncture a balloon. It looks like such a modification was not doable in the given window of time.
Another balloon. That would obviously be doable. If a balloon can fly at 60000 feet, another one can too. But again, you need the modifications to make it go up there and shoot at another balloon. Maybe in the future they'll make this type of balloons, but for now they didn't have one handy. And if they had, they didn't want to tip their hand. Better to use weaponry that's widely known to exist, rather than new and classified stuff.
At high altitude these sorts of balloons are massively stretched out due to the low atmospheric pressure. A puncture will cause catastrophic failure of the balloon.
> A runaway weather balloon floating toward Britain over the North Atlantic is proving a tough target for some of Canada’s top guns. The helium-filled balloon, a 25-story high unmanned research station used to measure ozone levels over Canada, was launched Monday from Vanscoy, Saskatchewan.
> Jet fighters trying to bring the balloon down fired more than 1,000 rounds into it Thursday, but it remained aloft. The air force hopes the now-leaking balloon will eventually come down.
Because, the powers that be, a.k.a. corrupt Biden family, sold to chinese commies, do not want what this balloon was all about, because their chinese overlords want to keep it hidden. After the payload of spy data was delivered home, i.e., china, the vehicle is destroyed. Otherwise, capturing it and reverse engineering what it was doing in US airspace, and what data it collected as it traversed the whole fucking country, would be very useful. Don't you think?
My understanding is we should wait until the balloon is accompanied by at least 98 others before we worry, worry, super-scurry, and call the troops out in a hurry.
AFAIK knights of the air riding super high-tech jet fighters could identify target as being ballon but not clarify target count nor classify target colour as being red. Target was nonetheless shot down as measurements fit within error margins.
Clearly development of higher-tech jet fighters must be funded ASAP.
Captcha updated to include question: "Pick images that have red ballons"
Captcha updated to include question: "Pick images that have 99 balloons"
Right, but on the otherhand an unqualified "Luftballon" pretty much exclusively refers to party balloons so their scale calculations must have been wayy off - perhaps a metric vs. imperial unit mixup.
Also, I knew about the "red" in the english name, but had no idea how different the english lyrics for the song are.
Actually, we should very much avoid doing that so that we don't end up standing pretty In this dust that was a city, looking for a souvenir just to prove the world was here.
This guy definitely is _the source_ I would use to get all my information. He has videos on every topic imaginable, I can only assume he's an expert in all of them.
I get puzzled about why people use such a low bandwidth medium as real time talking.if he put all that in a post it'd be a few hundred words and could be read in a minute.
I do agree but is anyone going to see that post? Even for Google searches (as opposed the video being pushed by the Youtube algorithm), videos are often ranked at/near the top.
Got to admit - I suffer from a myriad of conscious and unconscious biases - didn't see that kind of rational thinking coming from "Beau of the Fifth Column".
An actual antivaxer (as in someone who is against vaccines in general) or someone who has expressed doubts about how vaccines for a certain recent pandemic were handled? I ask because some people find the need to conflate these two a lot.
No, I prefer not to support those who have absurd anti-science beliefs. You are of course free to prefer crystals, chakras, essential oils, or whatever other flavor of the month you prefer. I remember polio. And measles. And mumps. And so many other diseases that vaccines have defeated so soundly that a certain percentage of fools no longer think vaccines are necessary. I'm not sure what blather about social credit has to do with that
Yeah, those biplanes don't have armaments though. Most fighters of the time were maxing out around 30-40,000 feet, with high altitude recon/bombers maxing out around 50k-ish
Well, if you want these United States to start shooting down any satellite overhead, then Russia and China follow suit and there'll be nothing left (and/or it will just provoke all-out war on the ground too.)
If we can launch wildly complex space hardware to look into the deepest regions of the universe we can bring down a balloon without the IronEagle dog fighter theatrics. You have to admit this came across like some old-timey George Creel propaganda.
We've plenty of reason to develop the technology for space flight.
We've essentially zero reason to develop the technology to hijack a high-altitude helium ballooon. As clearly demonstrated, much easier techniques already exist.
I have one question: If it was a rogue weather balloon, why didn't they call ahead and say, "hey we got this rogue weather balloon, headed into your airspace, don't freak out, shoot it down if you want, it's expendable, sorry for the aviation hazard", because that is what normal countries do.
> How do we know it is a spy balloon and not just a weather balloon that got lost??
We don’t _know_ this AFAIK, but we can make educated assumptions
> If it is a spy balloon why not take it down gently and look at its payload?
That’s what they did
> Did the balloon got on top of a military base by chance or was it directed?
Not publicly known AFAIK
> How was it directed from so far away if the balloon has no propellers?
I believe they said it had a propeller, but even if it didn’t balloons can be directed by changing altitude since the wind blows different directions based on how high up you are. This is how hot air balloons navigate
If there are unfortunate technical difficulties in either recovering or analyzing the balloon, we will know that it was in fact a weather balloon.
I don't buy the argument that all weather balloons look the same and this one is too big. If I wanted to camouflage spy balloons, I'd produce identically looking weather balloons.
Weather balloons have been pretty standard for decades, so if you want to start using a markedly different kind to blend in with your spy balloons you'll need to establish their plausibility first. Like showcasing them at metrological conferences where you enthusiastically explain the real advantages of such a large platform for weather monitoring and show the results you're getting and so on. Otherwise it's as if you turned up at a bank's drive-through in a tank claiming that it's just your family car.
> I don't buy the argument that all weather balloons look the same and this one is too big. If I wanted to camouflage spy balloons, I'd produce identically looking weather balloons.
That reasoning is topsy-turvy.
It would work if you would say: "It looks like a weather balloon, but I don't believe it is not a spy balloon just because of that. If I wanted to camouflage spy balloons, I'd produce identically looking weather balloons."
It doesn't work in a scenario where you are observing a balloon which looks different than the usual weather balloons. You cannot say "it cannot be a spy balloon because if it were a spy balloon I would design it to look like a weather balloon". Maybe it is a spy balloon and the people who made it didn't want to hide the fact. Maybe they wanted to hide the fact but couldn't.
Since 2020 I'm equally cynical. For all we know this event was coordinated between Xi and Biden to distract from ample domestic issues in both countries.
I don't quite believe the reason about guns not being fast enough to bring it down. Enough bullets will shred it eventually and bring it down pretty fast.
More of an issue would be that the plane has to come too close to the (relatively speaking) stationary target. That would be dangerous for the pilot and the plane.
Well, unsurprisingly, the US military knows more about this than you.
Multiple planes and over a thousand rounds is not enough to bring down a much smaller balloon[1]. Not to mention, a leaky balloon will fall slowly, making it an obstacle for regular air traffic.
A single missile is faster, cheaper, easier, etc. We didn't want to bring the balloon down "eventually". We wanted to bring down the balloon precisely and immediately, once it was over water but still in US airspace.
> I don't quite believe the reason about guns not being fast enough to bring it down.
What makes this reason a challenge for you to believe?
The F-22’s M61A2 20mm Gatling gun propels 20mm (~0.75”) rounds. A full load out is 480 rounds.
The target is a 90’ diameter, nearly atmosphere equalized pressure vessel. Striking the target with 480 rounds of that size is nowhere near enough to create a large escape surface for the slightly positive pressure gas to vacate quickly.
Signaling. It was super brazen invasion of US airspace, this wasn't an accident. So the response was overkill in response to that. Anyway, it looks like China started escalating the conflict today so we'll see how it ends up working out. What I'm confused about is why is China escalating today?
> Jet fighters trying to bring the balloon down fired more than 1,000 rounds into it Thursday, but it remained aloft. The air force hopes the now-leaking balloon will eventually come down.
Maybe there are some mundane reasons like that help justify it, but a lot of this seems like a bit of a show. I get the F-22 has a high ceiling for operations, but surely you could've shot a missile from a F-16 and accomplished the same thing.
Edit: As proof countries have downed high altitude balloons without F-22s and sidewinders in recent history.
Not guaranteed at all? The ceiling of an F-16 is lower. It's really not guaranteed that that would've worked. These missiles have limited range, and gaining altitude is costliest. It's entirely possible that a Sidewinder would not have worked from an F-16, requiring the use of a longer range, more expensive missile, and even that might not have worked as a balloon is a strange target and they picked this specific weapon system and platform because they believed it to have a high chance of success.
Why wouldn't you use your weapon system that has the highest probability of working on the first shot? The entire world was watching.
And most of it is amazed how much sensation is made of this (:
Brazen invasion, I'll wonder if they (US or China) will release honest details, but I cannot imagine much real purpose there and for now only assume incapability/incompetence.
I mean I'm not trying to say what effect it had, but high altitude balloons have been downed by multiple countries without F-22s firing sidewinders. I think the choice of F-22 was deliberate because of the visibility. To send a signal.
Let loose the comment section - i.e. stopped censoring nationalists on their internet. This sort ensures that rhetoric is progressively more heated and there will be less space for them to back down. Also they put out additional threats today.
The US is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, which stipulates that signatories make no territorial claims to outer space. The definition of outer space is often taken to be the Kármán line at 100km. However, the Treaty doesn't use any particular definition. But it does specify that the Moon is part of outer space. So we can assume the US is no taller than 362600km.
"According to international law, states retain sovereignty over the airspace above their territory – subject to certain aviation laws such as the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation (the Chicago Convention). Article 1 of the Chicago Convention makes this clear by providing that every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory.
This exclusive sovereignty does not extend to space, because according to Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty, outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
But where does sovereignty over airspace stop, and outer space begin? The exact legal boundary of space is not defined in international law."
At certain heights you are in space and space is international.
Anything above 110km is normally considered space, anything below 60km is a country's air space, anything between is a grey area.
That's why the gean BND had it's Space theory to justify it's spying.
> The NSA is also now free to float balloons around the country for cellphone capture.
Why would the NSA need to float balloons around the country when they could just ask/force the telecom companies to give them a copy of their cell tower data?
This is a very strange thing to say, because shooting a missile with an explosive warhead is exactly what most people expect, whereas the kinetic version does not come to mind immediately
> shooting a missile with an explosive warhead is exactly what most people expect
No, it tends to be far less dramatic than people imagine; the missile itself is largely a shrapnel delivery vehicle. If there's a fireball, it tends to come more from the thing you hit, which tends (but not in this case) to be full of jet fuel.
I just haven't seen reputable reporting that the missile didn't have a warhead. I was also noting that AA missiles in broad daylight and very far away aren't very exciting which might lead some to think it had no warhead.
Edit: In the closeup footage I see a flash of orange (explosion) in the debris cloud for a frame or two.
The missile was locked [Edit: had mistakenly said “guided”] by where the pilot was looking, and guided by IR so that it could hit precisely. Also, this missile had no warhead. They removed it on purpose to limit the damage. They wanted to maximize what they could recover and study.
Had the balloon been at an altitude the guns could reach, though, maybe the would have used them.
It was an AIM-9 Sidewinder. They're not sight directed; I think you're confused by the fact that the pilot can generate a lock-on by looking.
I can't find any reputable source claiming a removed warhead, and there's a visible detonation (it's not a Michael Bay movie, folks, they don't add gasoline to make a pretty fireball) on the close-up video; that greyish smoke cloud didn't come from the balloon. https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1621996717624393728
Yeah that missile fused. It was a normal AIM-9X. Missile war cranium detonations are underwhelming (there's not that many pounds of explosives involved) because they are trying to kill aircraft via shrapnel of some kind. Two common designs are a continuous rod that expands in a circle around the detonation, or a hashed metal casing that produces hundreds of small fragments.
I've seen this incorrect take repeated several places and I'm wondering where it originates. Yes, the missile had a warhead. No, missiles are not guided by where pilots are looking.
> Had the balloon been at an altitude the guns could reach, though, maybe the would have used them.
The jet was flying at approximately the same altitude of the balloon. The altitude of the balloon was below the max service ceiling of the aircraft.
The USA's DOD budget is nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Yet our air space was infiltrated by a balloon? And we had no low impact (?) way of bringing that ballon down?
Moral of the story...China makes a minuscule investment in a ballon and the USA increases an already bloated and excessive DOD budget. China without going to war suckers the USA into losing another financial battle.
Look this story is embarrassing, but the intercept was free. The entirety of it will come out of the training budget the pilots don't have to do for the month. As to the missile, apparently its $400k a pop. That balloon cost millions.
Cost is not the issue. Far more interesting is what was reveled. We have a political block to take down a foreign object in our airspace. The thing flew over the entire continental US. The F-22 can engage extremely fast (relative to the plane) targets at at least 65 000 ft with apparent ease (wikipedia's spec sheet previously said "more than 50 000 ft).
Edit: forgot to mention. The intercept was easy because the balloon was flying relatively low for a balloon. These things are hard to kill. If it were 80 000 ft, would you shoot it down with an F-22 and reveal a very secret characteristic of it? Or use a very expensive SAM?
Even if it were a weather balloon, the sensors on it would be insane and worth more than the missile. A spy satellite's sensors? Those lenses are filthy expensive.
Size matters, even just considering raw material costs. The fabric is not a cheap coarse cotton garment that would otherwise have become a pair of Levi's. Its full of Helium. On top of that the balloon's size makes it a difficult structural problem.
Nothing was "infiltrated". They knew where the balloon was since shortly after it left Chinese airspace and tracked it continously as it made it's way toward Alaska, south over Canada, and over the United States. (Is this thread being astroturfed?)
Some people have a vested interest in various US parties (the executive, the military, others?) looking inept. Some people have a very vested interested in those parties or a subset thereof looking competent. No need to spend money on astroturfing when the team politics knuckle draggers will do it for you.
Given that Trump said nothing as 3 similar balloons did the same thing but went undetected, this sounds more like happenstance that anyone knew about it this time.
* The IT community, despite the majority being some form of an intellectual, has either a flawed (read: Hollywood) or no understanding of physics or military aviation.
* The IT community, despite the majority being some form of an intellectual, has a patently insufficient understanding of how sovereignty, diplomacy, and laws work.
* The Chinese apologists are hilarious to witness, particularly the ones who believe two wrongs make a right.