Chinese Weather Balloons, and Should You Worry About Them?

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I hope you didn't leave the right one on a "pointy" side up chain link fence while trying to climb it. I know a guy who did that as a kid and he said it hurt pretty bad. Injuries like that are a real bloody mess as the scrotum is highly vascular. Kurt
Phrasing matters. Perhaps he also has one remaining right gonad to match his one remaining left. 😁
 
Orbiting satellites from other countries no doubt fly over the US.

I'm wondering at what altitude does a countries border no longer exist? Is there such a designation?

My apology if this has already been discussed here....
Yes there are international "rules" in place to cover such things. The "Outer Space Treaty" (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) is one.
 
Hypothetical situation
(trying to stay within the boundaries of most recent posts)
Your wife is a world renowned surgeon
You wake up and find your earlobe is missing. The wound is cauterized and bandaged professionally. You ask your wife what happened and she says it must've fallen off during the night. You believe her because she's a world renowned surgeon.

The next morning you wake up and you're missing the end of a finger. The tip is professionally sutured and bandaged. You're suspicious. CNN hasn't mentioned any sort of serial parts cut-er off-er cases so it must be your wife. You ask her about it and she suggests that you were sleepwalking. AHA, that must be it.

The following morning both testicles are missing. Again, you ask your wife about it and she says, that's perfectly normal for someone like you. She's a professional...
Hopelessly absurd hypothetical example that would never realistically happen is absurd.
 
Phrasing matters. Perhaps he also has one remaining right gonad to match his one remaining left. 😁
Or the right one was surgically removed for testicular cancer. That is a more comfortable way if "it has to go" to save one's life. Seen some relatively young guys have that happen to due to cancer. Fortunately. it's not that common in the general population.

Saw one fellow who lost one on a fence when he was a kid and then in his early 40's lost the other one to cancer. He fortunately was done having a family by then. Takes monthly shots now and one can't tell he's castrate by looking at him on the street. Kurt
 
DARPA has a highly classified prototype of an ABB.
Anti Balloon Balloon.
Rocket powered with laser homing sensors.
Hit to kill.
Tests so far have failed to bring down the target.

View attachment 561687
I didn't realize any of the Drone Ubiquitous Demolition Exsanguinators were still in existence.

I thought they all perished in a nearly invisible brush with abrasive solids, or were just carelessly laid on concrete.

Good to know we are still protected.
 
Gotta love folks who toss around the fake news vs. the no it isn't fake news accusations without citing any credible sources.

Good times.
OK, I'll play. Linked is a transcript to a Pentagon press briefing. The briefing officers' names are redacted, but the Pentagon reporters clearly know them. This is also released on the Pentagon's website, so it bears the authority of the Department of Defense.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Transc...military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/
Anyone else who disputes this account is welcome to post a link to their sources so that we can judge the relative reliability.

Some interesting tidbits:
There were three overflights of the continental US in the prior administration and one previously in this administration, but none went for this long.

The F-22 was at 58,000 feet when it fired the missile. The balloon was at 60-65,000 feet.

The debris landed about 6 NM offshore. [Editorial comment: If it had gone past 12 NM, we would have less control over the landing site since it wouldn't be in our territorial waters]

Navy ships involved in the shootdown/recovery include(d) the USS Oscar Austin, USS Philippine Sea, and the USS Carter Hall.

The military has been tracking the balloon since at least 1/28, when it entered the Alaska Joint Operating Area [anyone who knows how big this area is is welcome to comment]. It entered Canada 1/30 and re-entered US airspace on 1/31 over Idaho. The Canadians were tracking it in their airspace.

The US had a plan to take the balloon down over Montana, but didn't take that shot because of the risk of civilian casualties on the ground.

Multiple vessels are already on-scene. When the salvage ship arrives, Navy divers will dive the debris if needed. They can also retrieve debris with unmanned vessels.

The New York Times asked the defense officials to put the statement out with the defense officials identified.

There was an intelligence benefit to the US to continue to allow the balloon to operate, though this was secondary to the risk to people on the ground.
 
By the way, if anyone would like a more detailed look at the boats and ships involved in securing the scene and actually salvaging the debris, I can post that. I don't really want to do an hour or so of work if nobody's interested though. FWIW, I have professional experience with a number of the types of boats and ships involved.
 
By the way, if anyone would like a more detailed look at the boats and ships involved in securing the scene and actually salvaging the debris, I can post that. I don't really want to do an hour or so of work if nobody's interested though. FWIW, I have professional experience with a number of the types of boats and ships involved.
I’d be interested, thank you.
 
By the way, if anyone would like a more detailed look at the boats and ships involved in securing the scene and actually salvaging the debris, I can post that. I don't really want to do an hour or so of work if nobody's interested though. FWIW, I have professional experience with a number of the types of boats and ships involved.
+2
 
Here's a quick rundown of some of the boats that are responding to the balloon debris site. There's two phases of this: initial response and salvaging stuff. I might break this into two posts to talk about that separately.

What we know/can guess about the payload:
First of all, it helps to know what we're looking at picking out of the water. From one of the fantastic memes on this thread, we have the following picture. The long (red) dimension is reported to be ~80', which means that the short (green) dimension is around 50'. It's reported to weigh around 1000 lbs. I don't have any reason to doubt any of that, and honestly it doesn't really matter in the grander scheme of things (IOW 70' x 40' x 800 lbs would be roughly the same analysis, as would 90' x 60' x 1200 lbs). Also, my mindsim says that this is going to tumble as it falls or even fall flat, so it probably won't be going too fast when it hits the water. There will be some damage, but it's not going to completely demolish the truss structure.

1675709671290.png

Who's on site now?
The DOD press transcript above noted that the following ships are/were on site: USS Oscar Austin (DDG-79), USS Philippine Sea (CG-58), and the USS Carter Hall (LSD-50). In addition, the USNS Pathfinder (T-AGS-60) shows up on the AIS tracking sites in the area. In the real-time image below, the Carter Hall is the gray ship and the Pathfinder is the larger cyan ship. The smaller cyan ship is reported as a "tug or special craft" but isn't entirely clear what.
1675710161367.png

In addition, this link shows a few pictures of ships offshore taken from the beach. Most of the early ones look like the Carter Hall or Pathfinder, but later on there's a Coast Guard cutter at sunset or sunrise. I should know my Coast Guard cutters better, but it's a fairly large one. It's larger than the ones stationed in Charleston, so it probably came up from Florida or down from Newport News. There are now doubt a few smaller USCG boats out there as well. I can't see any pictures, but the RB-M would be a good guess.

So what were those ships doing? The DDG and CG are air defense ships. They were presumably using their extremely expensive radars to track the balloon and feeding information to the F-22 and then tracking the debris down to the ocean surface. Combined arms for the win! They may or may not still be on site. It's a bit hard to tell since warships don't normally have AIS systems turned on. Anyway, their job is done now. The Carter Hall is likely providing the command and control station and likely some amount of space to store stuff they pick up off of the sea bottom. They do have their AIS on, but I assume that's to more or less wave the flag rather than because they're required to. The USCG boats and ship(s) are there because they have the legal authority to close an area of the sea due to "navigational hazards" or other things. If anyone breaks the exclusion zone, it's the USCG that's going to arrest them. Worst case, the small boats are all armed with .50-caliber machine guns and the larger cutter has a bigger gun. That is extremely unlikely though it's possible.

The Pathfinder is an interesting one. The T-AGS class are oceanographic survey ships, outfitted with a variety of exciting sonar products. 20 years ago, the commercial versions of those sonars could not only see a tire on the sea bottom half a mile away, but it could tell you whether it was the right size for a Ford Escort or Expedition. The T-AGS likely has better grades of sonar now. They're making a map of the sea bottom and determining what's there, how big the debris field it, and getting the command team enough information to prioritize what pieces to pick up first.

None of the ships other than the Carter Hall have anything like the lifting capacity to pick up the entire balloon payload. It's not so much a matter of lift capacity, but the overall size of the thing. You would want a boom that reached a good 40-50 feet past the side of the hull to pick up something that big without punching a hole in your own ship or breaking stuff on the payload as you lift it. You also need significant diver support to rig up your crane to the payload. While that can be done with standard commercial dive tanks with a ~60-minute dwell time on the bottom, it would be nice to have a real system with surface supplied air so that you can have more significant time on the bottom.

More info about actually picking stuff out of the water in a future post.
 
On to actually pulling stuff out of the water. I'll try to keep @ThirstyBarbarian 's TMI from distracting me. :D

There's more or less two things that you need to consider when choosing a salvage crane. #1 is capacity (how much can you lift and how far off the side of the vessel?). What you have on board to support divers is another aspect of capacity. #2 is when you can get there. That's divided into two parts, mobilization time (how soon can you leave port) and transit time (how long does it take to get from your homeport to the salvage site). I'm assuming for the mobilization time that the ships are in port, not doing something else, and not in a scheduled maintenance period.

Recall above that we're looking at lifting a ~80' x 50' x 1000 lb object and we would like to have significant diver support systems. You'll want a reasonably large deck to put stuff on, a 60'-100' crane (minimum) and some dive support systems. We'll be using the divers to hook big stuff to the salvage ship's crane and also to search for/pick up smaller stuff from the seafloor. While the depth itself (47') isn't that much of an issue, dwell time on the bottom might make a bigger difference, as would having a really good idea of where you are on the bottom. Of all of the requirements, the crane boom length and the dive systems are going to be the limiting factors.

So here are a few options:

US Navy assets:
I'm having a lot of trouble sorting out what salvage assets the Navy has on the East Coast. It doesn't help that they're in the middle of replacing their salvage ships, so the mix of ships available seems to be a hot mess of old ships like the USNS Grasp and chartered ships like the Kellie Chouest. The Grasp's lifting booms are probably a little shorter than you'd like, but it's set up as a salvage ship and has lots of other lifting tackle that could help manage the load as it come aboard. Both of those ships have plenty of dive support gear. Regardless of which one it is, the ship would likely be coming from Norfolk, VA or Mayport (Jacksonville, FL). Those are 350 and 250 NM away (respectively), and the ships in question travel at 10-13 knots, for a total travel time of 20-36 hours. Mobilization time on these ships would likely be a day or less; just enough to get some fuel and load up some groceries if you don't have them on board already. Mobilization plus travel time are in the 2-day range, which is what the President said we should expect. I would guess that this is what the Navy is doing, but here's a couple more off-the-wall suggestions:

It's possible that the Carter Hall is also the salvage ship. I don't know what dive support systems they have on board, though I would suspect that they're fairly limited. You could also see a bunch of outfits like the SEALs wanting to get in on the action. If the Carter Hall is the salvage ship and doesn't have its own dive support systems, that's probably the most likely scenario for dive support. The Carter Hall's top speed is over 20 knots, and it's homeported in Norfolk.

USCG Buoy Tenders:
The USCG has a bunch of buoy tenders whose only job is to take care of all of the aids to navigation that keep mariners off of the rocks. The Juniper class and Keeper class are good examples. They don't have the dive support facilities, though that could be supplied from other ships in a pinch. They also have nice large grapnels that you can drag the bottom to hook stuff without a diver. The downside is that you'll probably do some damage to whatever you were picking up. If time was of the absolute essence, you might use a buoy tender if it was close. They run at the same speed as the salvage ships above*, so unless they're in the immediate area it's going to take a day or so to get there. They're also either working or in maintenance nearly their entire lives. That's good because you don't have to worry about mobilization time, but bad because they might be working buoys 200 NM on the other side of their nominal home port.

Civilian Assets:
You have some potential classified information issues with civilians, but let's set those aside for now and just look at the boats. I can nearly guarantee you that there's a crane barge that can lift the payload sitting (or working) in the Port of Charleston. If there's not one there, there's a barge you can roll a tracked crane on to. They almost certainly have commercial divers in the same port, with a boat that they can work from or a trailer that they can roll on to the crane barge. Travel time is great because you're less than 100 miles away. Your tug could push you out there in half a day. The problem is mobilization time. It's not so much getting the barge ready to go, it's getting the contracting sorted out. If the company doesn't have a pre-existing contract with DOD, it will take at least a week to get contracting sorted far enough that you can go out and work. And that's on an emergency basis for a barge that already has the crane on board. If you're rolling one on, you need to do some engineering to make sure the deck can support it, and make sure the crane won't roll the barge over (or break the crane) when it moves the boom over the side of the barge. That's going to take a week*.

Everything would be easier if the companies involved already had contracts with DOD for marine services. That would cut the contracting time down dramatically. Unfortunately, those are going to be companies like Chouest and Hornbeck (located in Louisiana) or companies that serve the naval bases in Norfolk or Mayport. That doesn't save you transit time and the mobilization time is going to be the same.

The end result is that you're highly unlikely to see a faster response time than 2-3 days for a salvage ship, and anything else is likely to not have the tools that you need to get the job done. As noted upthread, would you rather use a Formula 1 racer or a tow truck to get a car out of the ditch? The F1 car can get there faster, but it doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job.

I've rambled enough now. Any questions?
 
I think the big issue with this balloon was the SIZE. There are a lot of balloons circumnavigating the earth at any given time. Amateur, professional, educational institutions, government organizations, etc. Some even go around multiple times.

I don't think any of the previous Chinese State balloons were near this size. That's why this one was so clear in the sky, and why it could carry a lot more "stuff" in the payload section. Typical balloon is only a spec in the sky, even with visual support. (Binoculars, Telescope, etc.)

One other thing about the safety issues of downing it over land. Assuming this is more than just some weather sensors... Haha. There are items in the payload that need certain temperatures, and stable temperatures to work correctly. The number of refrigerants (for heating [or] cooling) that would work at over 60,000 ft is very limited. None of them would be good to drop in someone's yard, or pasture. Also, this thing undoubtedly has some serious batteries, if they are lipo's thats a big fire hazard. Waiting and dropping this in the ocean, they can let any "volatiles" disperse, and there was no fire risk.
 
Some kinds of RF, local comms, etc. Doesn't have to be optical data.

AT 60+K feet (11+ miles), you will not be picking up any battery powered comms. Consumer or military.
Even commercial UHF (700 to 2,600 Mhz) cell signals. Partly because cell sectors antennas are directionally beam-formed horizontal to the ground (for obvious reasons). Partly because few broadcast much above 100-150 Watts in rural areas. More like 20-50 Watts in urban areas.

They could pickup higher-power TV antenna transmissions or omni-directional military antenna broadcasts, but those could be detected from orbit.

We'll see when the payload is recovered.

Yep.
Though I doubt the results of analysis will be shared in public.
 
AT 60+K feet (11+ miles), you will not be picking up any battery powered comms. Consumer or military.
Even commercial UHF (700 to 2,600 Mhz) cell signals. Partly because cell sectors antennas are directionally beam-formed horizontal to the ground (for obvious reasons). Partly because few broadcast much above 100-150 Watts in rural areas. More like 20-50 Watts in urban areas.

They could pickup higher-power TV antenna transmissions or omni-directional military antenna broadcasts, but those could be detected from orbit.



Yep.
Though I doubt the results of analysis will be shared in public.
It's true that the balloon would be unlikely to detect directionally transmitted signals from a station directly below it, but because the earth is round, the balloon was still in the path of a lot of horizontally transmitted signals that are at a greater radius. Billings is 177 miles away from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls. The distance to the horizon from an object hovering at 60,000 feet is approximately 300 miles. That's still an improvement over being in orbit and trying to detect RF.
 
On to actually pulling stuff out of the water. I'll try to keep @ThirstyBarbarian 's TMI from distracting me. :D

There's more or less two things that you need to consider when choosing a salvage crane. #1 is capacity (how much can you lift and how far off the side of the vessel?). What you have on board to support divers is another aspect of capacity. #2 is when you can get there. That's divided into two parts, mobilization time (how soon can you leave port) and transit time (how long does it take to get from your homeport to the salvage site). I'm assuming for the mobilization time that the ships are in port, not doing something else, and not in a scheduled maintenance period.

Recall above that we're looking at lifting a ~80' x 50' x 1000 lb object and we would like to have significant diver support systems. You'll want a reasonably large deck to put stuff on, a 60'-100' crane (minimum) and some dive support systems. We'll be using the divers to hook big stuff to the salvage ship's crane and also to search for/pick up smaller stuff from the seafloor. While the depth itself (47') isn't that much of an issue, dwell time on the bottom might make a bigger difference, as would having a really good idea of where you are on the bottom. Of all of the requirements, the crane boom length and the dive systems are going to be the limiting factors.

So here are a few options:

US Navy assets:
I'm having a lot of trouble sorting out what salvage assets the Navy has on the East Coast. It doesn't help that they're in the middle of replacing their salvage ships, so the mix of ships available seems to be a hot mess of old ships like the USNS Grasp and chartered ships like the Kellie Chouest. The Grasp's lifting booms are probably a little shorter than you'd like, but it's set up as a salvage ship and has lots of other lifting tackle that could help manage the load as it come aboard. Both of those ships have plenty of dive support gear. Regardless of which one it is, the ship would likely be coming from Norfolk, VA or Mayport (Jacksonville, FL). Those are 350 and 250 NM away (respectively), and the ships in question travel at 10-13 knots, for a total travel time of 20-36 hours. Mobilization time on these ships would likely be a day or less; just enough to get some fuel and load up some groceries if you don't have them on board already. Mobilization plus travel time are in the 2-day range, which is what the President said we should expect. I would guess that this is what the Navy is doing, but here's a couple more off-the-wall suggestions:

It's possible that the Carter Hall is also the salvage ship. I don't know what dive support systems they have on board, though I would suspect that they're fairly limited. You could also see a bunch of outfits like the SEALs wanting to get in on the action. If the Carter Hall is the salvage ship and doesn't have its own dive support systems, that's probably the most likely scenario for dive support. The Carter Hall's top speed is over 20 knots, and it's homeported in Norfolk.

USCG Buoy Tenders:
The USCG has a bunch of buoy tenders whose only job is to take care of all of the aids to navigation that keep mariners off of the rocks. The Juniper class and Keeper class are good examples. They don't have the dive support facilities, though that could be supplied from other ships in a pinch. They also have nice large grapnels that you can drag the bottom to hook stuff without a diver. The downside is that you'll probably do some damage to whatever you were picking up. If time was of the absolute essence, you might use a buoy tender if it was close. They run at the same speed as the salvage ships above*, so unless they're in the immediate area it's going to take a day or so to get there. They're also either working or in maintenance nearly their entire lives. That's good because you don't have to worry about mobilization time, but bad because they might be working buoys 200 NM on the other side of their nominal home port.

Civilian Assets:
You have some potential classified information issues with civilians, but let's set those aside for now and just look at the boats. I can nearly guarantee you that there's a crane barge that can lift the payload sitting (or working) in the Port of Charleston. If there's not one there, there's a barge you can roll a tracked crane on to. They almost certainly have commercial divers in the same port, with a boat that they can work from or a trailer that they can roll on to the crane barge. Travel time is great because you're less than 100 miles away. Your tug could push you out there in half a day. The problem is mobilization time. It's not so much getting the barge ready to go, it's getting the contracting sorted out. If the company doesn't have a pre-existing contract with DOD, it will take at least a week to get contracting sorted far enough that you can go out and work. And that's on an emergency basis for a barge that already has the crane on board. If you're rolling one on, you need to do some engineering to make sure the deck can support it, and make sure the crane won't roll the barge over (or break the crane) when it moves the boom over the side of the barge. That's going to take a week*.

Everything would be easier if the companies involved already had contracts with DOD for marine services. That would cut the contracting time down dramatically. Unfortunately, those are going to be companies like Chouest and Hornbeck (located in Louisiana) or companies that serve the naval bases in Norfolk or Mayport. That doesn't save you transit time and the mobilization time is going to be the same.

The end result is that you're highly unlikely to see a faster response time than 2-3 days for a salvage ship, and anything else is likely to not have the tools that you need to get the job done. As noted upthread, would you rather use a Formula 1 racer or a tow truck to get a car out of the ditch? The F1 car can get there faster, but it doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job.

I've rambled enough now. Any questions?
Chinese assets just spotted about 15 miles off South Carolina coast.

junk boat.jpg
 
Gotta love folks who toss around the fake news vs. the no it isn't fake news accusations without citing any credible sources.

Good times.
If you are referring to me being a "no it isn't fake news" poster.........
I cited my source, that being the official Department of Defense website, which I would assume to be "credible" at least.

s6
 
.USCG Buoy Tenders:
The USCG has a bunch of buoy tenders whose only job is to take care of all of the aids to navigation that keep mariners off of the rocks. The Juniper class and Keeper class are good examples. They don't have the dive support facilities, though that could be supplied from other ships in a pinch. They also have nice large grapnels that you can drag the bottom to hook stuff without a diver. The downside is that you'll probably do some damage to whatever you were picking up. If time was of the absolute essence, you might use a buoy tender if it was close. They run at the same speed as the salvage ships above*, so unless they're in the immediate area it's going to take a day or so to get there. They're also either working or in maintenance nearly their entire lives. That's good because you don't have to worry about mobilization time, but bad because they might be working buoys 200 NM on the other side of their nominal home port.
I doubt a seagoing tender would be much good. The only one even marginally close enough is the Maple (WLB-207) based out of Atlantic Beach N.C. My thought is they are purpose built, don’t have a particularly large working deck, the crew is not really trained in recovery, and the crane does not have much reach nor does it likely have enough cable. The grapple is a crude tool at best and we only used them to snag dropped mooring chains. Of course my experience is probably out of date and was an older (Iris) class ship the Mariposa.
 
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