Chinese Weather Balloons, and Should You Worry About Them?

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Matt_The_RocketMan said:
So... Rather than use a single inert 20mm round from an F-18 to puncture the balloon and recover the payload, our Military scrambled an F-22 and used a $1M air-to-air missile to obliterate it. Not only a ridiculously unnecessary expense, the explosion and shrapnel from the missile most certainly destroyed the payload. Nothing to recover and examine. Hundreds or thousands of pieces now scattered on the sea floor. Something is very, very off with this whole sequence of events.

From a reply on Fox news…. Not my words
Click to expand...
Whoever did write that has no understanding of physics. A balloon the size of three school buses would take forever to leak a noticeable amount of helium from two 20mm holes.
 
Matt_The_RocketMan said:
So... Rather than use a single inert 20mm round from an F-18 to puncture the balloon and recover the payload, our Military scrambled an F-22 and used a $1M air-to-air missile to obliterate it. Not only a ridiculously unnecessary expense, the explosion and shrapnel from the missile most certainly destroyed the payload. Nothing to recover and examine. Hundreds or thousands of pieces now scattered on the sea floor. Something is very, very off with this whole sequence of events.

From a reply on Fox news…. Not my words
Click to expand...
If I were a Chinese PLA planner the best case dream scenario would be:
1. Spycraft enters US as planned.
2. The US lets the spycraft fly over its intended targets and completes it's mission.
3. Then the US destroys the equipment over salt water.
 
I'm glad they let it go as far as they did. The more intelligence they collect on what we have to kill them the more they will behave. That being said as far as downing it, I believe that our fighter jets have a ceiling of 50-55 thousand feet. So no matter what the weapon used to down it most likely would damage the payload anyway.
 
Matt_The_RocketMan said:
So... Rather than use a single inert 20mm round from an F-18 to puncture the balloon and recover the payload, our Military scrambled an F-22 and used a $1M air-to-air missile to obliterate it. Not only a ridiculously unnecessary expense, the explosion and shrapnel from the missile most certainly destroyed the payload. Nothing to recover and examine. Hundreds or thousands of pieces now scattered on the sea floor. Something is very, very off with this whole sequence of events.

From a reply on Fox news…. Not my words
Click to expand...
And now the Pentagon is quoted as saying that a salvage vessel will be on site “in a couple of days”. A couple of days? SMH
 
jazzviper1 said:
The answer to the original question is YES! We should worry about everything those evil bastards do. (I refer to the CCP, not the average citizen). Just watch China uncensored on YouTube.
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The answer to the original question is NO! Don't you think we do the same thing to them? Spying is a billion dollar industry. That is just the way it works, and the hysteria is quite amusing, but also pathetic. The following behavior is the actual threat to the United States:
https://qz.com/1680964/pentagon-testing-mass-surveillance-balloons-over-midwest
 
all of the reporters are concentrating on the balloon envelope where the payload below the balloon is the
important part. the red arrow in the attached photo is the payloadpop.jpg
 
Matt_The_RocketMan said:
So... Rather than use a single inert 20mm round from an F-18 to puncture the balloon and recover the payload, our Military scrambled an F-22 and used a $1M air-to-air missile to obliterate it. Not only a ridiculously unnecessary expense, the explosion and shrapnel from the missile most certainly destroyed the payload. Nothing to recover and examine. Hundreds or thousands of pieces now scattered on the sea floor. Something is very, very off with this whole sequence of events.

From a reply on Fox news…. Not my words
Click to expand...
Missiles have to be tested and practised with in any case so why not when it’s somewhat useful. And with an immediate free fall, they can probably better predict or select where the remains will land.
 
Matt_The_RocketMan said:
So... Rather than use a single inert 20mm round from an F-18 to puncture the balloon and recover the payload, our Military scrambled an F-22 and used a $1M air-to-air missile to obliterate it. Not only a ridiculously unnecessary expense, the explosion and shrapnel from the missile most certainly destroyed the payload. Nothing to recover and examine. Hundreds or thousands of pieces now scattered on the sea floor. Something is very, very off with this whole sequence of events.

From a reply on Fox news…. Not my words
Click to expand...
Yep - doesn't make sense. The F22 is the US fighter with the highest ceiling, and it has a cannon on board.
All of the retired generals on Fox assumed it would be shot down but an auto cannon and drift to the surface. I am pretty sure they do understand physics. A 20 or 30 mm auto cannon can make more than a couple of holes in a balloon. If necessary they could shred it..
 
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Tyeeking said:
And now the Pentagon is quoted as saying that a salvage vessel will be on site “in a couple of days”. A couple of days? SMH
Click to expand...
well they said it's in 47 ft of water, so that'll be ideal for picking up lots and lots of little bitty pieces
 
So wow.... a billion dollar plane with a million dollar missile, and we shot down a $30 balloon. And the GOP won't pay for it because they won't raise the debt ceiling. This country is crazy.
 
Tyeeking said:
And now the Pentagon is quoted as saying that a salvage vessel will be on site “in a couple of days”. A couple of days? SMH
Click to expand...
It turns out that boats that can do search/salvage operations in moderately deep water [see edit below] are fairly specialized, fairly slow, and never where you want them when you need them. Even if they activated the boat immediately on the balloon entering US airspace a few days ago, it would take time to get there. Whatever it is on the bottom isn't going anywhere, and it would be just as hard to find now as it would have been if the ship was on station over it tomorrow.

[edit] If it is in 47 feet of water, that's a different kettle of fish. That boat could be on site sooner. Weirdly, it may be a more specialized boat to work effectively in <50 feet of water than 100 feet. Also, note that the intelligence agencies might like the Chinese to not know exactly how much we recovered.
patbunn said:
Yep - doesn't make sense. The F22 is the US fighter with the highest ceiling, and it has a cannon on board.
All of the retired generals on Fox assumed it would be shot down but an auto cannon and drift to the surface. I am pretty sure they do understand physics. A 20 or 30 mm auto cannon can make more than a couple of holes in a balloon. If necessary they could shred it..
Click to expand...
I'm kinda surprised they didn't use the gun too. On the other hand, they're the professionals and I'm not. I assume that the Air Force and relevant intelligence agencies know what they're doing.
 
hobie1dog said:
well they said it's in 47 ft of water, so that'll be ideal for picking up lots and lots of little bitty pieces
Click to expand...
Assuming that the currents haven’t swept them away in the “couple of days” that they said it would take a salvage vessel to get there.
 
boatgeek said:
It turns out that boats that can do search/salvage operations in moderately deep water are fairly specialized, fairly slow, and never where you want them when you need them. Even if they activated the boat immediately on the balloon entering US airspace a few days ago, it would take time to get
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It’s reported to be in 47 feet of water. A novice scuba diver can safely dive to 60 feet. LOL
 
patbunn said:
Shooting a balloon with a Sidewinder isn't exactly practice
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In peacetime, all they do counts as practice and preparation. Flight cost per hour for an F-22 is roughly $70,000 either way so the missile cost doesn't change much in a yearly budget.
 
I still don't understand destroying 90% of it with a missile instead of just compromising the balloon itself, and letting it come down fairly quickly, but not destroy everything into a thousand pieces. logical and rational thinking are usually things that are lacking the farther you go up in government.
 
Operational ceiling of the ~30, U2's is 70,000 at a speed of 410mph. I "wonder" if they went up at dusk, dawn, (maybe night), when all the cell phones, and news cameras couldn't see, and did a close-up "look" at it. That would be a slow enough "flyby" to get get data. Flying a F22, operational ceiling of 50,000, would go by so quick it would be difficult to "see" anything from at least 10,000ft away.
 
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Second.... I heard a radio interview a couple days ago.

The guy talking was basically saying that he's surprised there's as much reaction about this as there has been. Apparently, the US has over a thousand such balloons over the continent at any given time. They are all at such an altitude (60,000' plus) that essentially no one notices them, even though they are "in plain sight" all over the place. They go up, and come down, all the time.

Yes, this one is Chinese, and yes that is definitely a concern. But according to him, it's really not all that unusual, given that there's thousands of balloons up there "all the time", and that a certain percentage of them (ours AND theirs) are bound to go off course (perhaps even intentionally) from time to time. He made it sound like a foreign "weather balloon" over the country is probably more common than not.

Either way, it shouldn't have been there, and the US was right to deal with it. But the whole "shocked and surprised" thing is overblown. See a Chinese balloon over your territory? Shoot it down, and get on with your life. Done.

s6
 
Watch the videos closely. The balloon is moving very slow. The missile is going mach ~2.5... When the warhead goes off at about 10% of the way up the balloon envelope; all the fragments were downrange of the Payload unit buy a significant amount buy the time they reached the diameter of where the payload was suspended.

The "bits" fluttering down in the few seconds of video that show the payload, NOT the Balloon, are probably the solar panels. They are/were on long thin arms and the shock of going into free fall broke them apart.
 
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hobie1dog said:
well they said it's in 47 ft of water, so that'll be ideal for picking up lots and lots of little bitty pieces
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"They" were able to pick up roughly 50% of the Challenger and it was in much deeper water (~2X) so I don't think this will be that difficult. The reality is most of the parts won't be in "little bitty pieces" and considering the design of the structure, they won't have a problem finding the "good stuff".
 
Tyeeking said:
It’s reported to be in 47 feet of water. A novice scuba diver can safely dive to 60 feet. LOL
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How’s the diver going to get there? On a civilian dive boat that happens to be not in a maintenance period in the crappy weather season? Because we’re going to pick up a classified payload and put it on a civilian boat? You may have seen in the news lately that the feds don’t like people without clearances to see classified stuff.

Your divers have gotten to the site. What’s the visibility like? We presumably have a good idea of where it hit the water, but you’re probably looking at an acre or two of search area. Who’s going to coordinate the search grid? Do you have space on your commercial dive boat to manage that search?

OK, your divers have found it. How are they going to lift an object heavy enough that it needed a balloon that size to stay aloft? Maneuvering a couple hundred pound object underwater is not easy. Do you have a winch big enough to haul it up? How likely are you to break it while you lift it?

Or you could just wait a couple of days for the pros to arrive and do it right.
 
Bravo52 said:
"They" were able to pick up roughly 50% of the Challenger and it was in much deeper water (~2X) so I don't think this will be that difficult. The reality is most of the parts won't be in "little bitty pieces" and considering the design of the structure, they won't have a problem finding the "good stuff".
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Absolutely. I’m just disputing the notion that the pros who will lift this stuff should be on site in less than a couple of days.
 
hobie1dog said:
I still don't understand destroying 90% of it with a missile instead of just compromising the balloon itself, and letting it come down fairly quickly, but not destroy everything into a thousand pieces. logical and rational thinking are usually things that are lacking the farther you go up in government.
Click to expand...
Another factor may be where they could drop it in the ocean. They might prefer to have the pieces come down quickly so that they’re closer to shore and easier to salvage. Most likely the winds are strong enough that a ship wouldn’t be able to keep up with it anyway. If it gets outside 12 miles, it’s possible that the Chinese or Russians could salvage it. Inside 12 miles we have a lot more control.

This is all speculation.
 

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