It is so hilarious how all of a sudden we're supposed to be afraid of "spy balloons," despite the fact that this is a free country and if anyone actually wanted to spy on any given place in North America, they could literally just send an actual spy, he could fly in on a commercial jet, rent a car and just drive over to the interesting place, and look around. Add in a $500 drone and your spy could get a heck of a lot closer look at most things from the comfort of a nearby parked car. This balloon stuff seems incredibly unlikely to be anything.
Can you please make your substantive points without snark and swipes? The site guidelines ask you not to do those things, because they degrade discussion and we're trying for something else here.
You can't be serious. Spy balloons are definitely happening, just because not every balloon is one doesn't mean it's not so. You can't send a spy and have them fly over nuclear silos or collect transmission date from above them, then beam said data back to your home base near instantly, etc. You can't send a spy to the middle of the ocean above US assets in international waters either. Pretty silly comment. Spying is multi-facet. It's like saying spy satellites aren't real because you could just hire a crop duster and hook up equipment to their plane and have them fly over a city. Comically wrong.
I am growing tired and weary of some people thinking everything is fake or some distraction from other things, as if humans are completely incapable of focusing on more than one thing at a time.
Comically wrong. You can drive by or fly over nuclear silos any time. They’re right off the highways and county roads. None of them are in restricted or prohibited airspace. You can rent an apartment in Great Falls and capture 1000X more sigint than a silly troll balloon. They have internet there too.
Can you please make your substantive points without snark and swipes? The HN guidelines ask you not to do those things, because they degrade discussion and we're trying for something else here.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments repeatedly. We end up having to ban that sort of account because it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. I don't want to ban you, so it would be good if you'd fix this going forward.
Spy balloons (and drones) are 100000% a thing. I think it's laughable that you can even try to argue otherwise.
As to why the US suddenly cares publicly, probably mostly political because the Chinese balloon was spotted by a civilian and there was a public outcry. That doesn't mean they aren't happening, nor that the governments across the world aren't aware of them.
you're own link: "Drones are prohibited.. from the ground up to 400 feet above ground level"
This, charitably, is called moving the goal posts. I fly over/near a nuclear plant every couple of months on my way somewhere. I am not a drone. Pilots fly over silo fields and nuclear plants all day, every day.
Your quote from their link is a boilerplate minimum restriction that applies when no further restriction is provided. Most places, especially "sensitive" ones have even stricter limitations. Go ahead and try and fly a drone 500 ft above a military airbase, you'll meet some fun people and have plenty of free time to pick up a new hobby.
Nuclear silos are generally not that sensitive, because they are all 60 years old and everyone can identify them on satellite imaging, but if you fly a drone near one, you will definitely be surveilled by some security, whether you know it or not.
If you bothered to read it's a ~3-mile radius from the plant, but sure. If you want to test your theory, go ahead and buy a drone and try flying it only 300ft above a nuclear power plant. As soon as you're found out, you'll promptly be arrested (if your drone doesn't already automatically shut off due to GPS geofencing).
Can you please make your substantive points without snark and swipes? The HN guidelines ask you not to do those things, because they degrade discussion and we're trying for something else here.
You did it repeatedly in this thread, and unfortunately have been doing it elsewhere too—and we've had to warn you about this kind of thing more than once before. When accounts behave this way, we end up having to ban them. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It literally is restricted and prohibited; this poster is just wrong. They might be surprised to know there are even drone restrictions over certain areas, any commercial drone pilot knows this and it's part of their test for certification. Some drones will even disengage if they are within a certain geofence, or you'll just go to jail.
Just don't tell anyone what you are gathering for the purpose of spying. Just tell (if anyone would be bothered enough) what you are a blogg^W influencer and making a new TikTok.
In china many tourist areas overlook navy bases. If a foreign tourist just points their camera in that direction, they are in for a rough time, perhaps even a couple of years in prison if they want to retaliate for something like the detaining of huawei CEO’s daughter. America is pretty benign in comparison
> Just don't tell anyone what you are gathering for the purpose of spying. Just tell (if anyone would be bothered enough) what you are a blogg^W influencer and making a new TikTok.
Yeah, like a Chinese national renting an apartment in some weird place and frequently "hiking" near missile silos with a bunch of unusual electronics isn't going to attract unwanted attention. The FBI would be totally fooled by your influencer ruse.
You know what's so great about spy baloons? They're things not people. Using them doesn't put any of your people at risk. That's, like, a consideration.
Most of these balloons were large to massive. The one we're still sticking to the "spy balloon" story on was about 90 feet in size, and was estimated to have capabilities similar to a spy satellite. [1] So you can send some giant object which will inevitably be detected, and cause a conflict, or you can keep using your already present surveillance satellites to do the exact same thing, 'invisibly.' What, exactly, is supposed to be the logic here?
I also find our own reaction somewhat telling. It seems difficult to imagine that $800 billion a year isn't enough to find some way to recover a balloon. Yet we chose to destroy it, and send the debris for a swim on top of it. Whatever's left of the device is almost certainly completely wasted. Would you want to do this if you believe there might be evidence of surreptitious behavior, potentially to try to compromise high security locations, on that balloon? Or would you deploy signal jamming technology and work to recover the balloon intact?
Our reaction just feels like a meme. I can't help but hear this song [2] playing in the background as I envision an F-22 making its flyby locking on $400k missiles to bring down a balloon.
Satellite orbits are pretty easy to predict. You can do your secret stuff when you know there is a gap in coverage and then throw a tarp over it when they are passing overhead. A balloon screws this up. It can go anywhere anytime. Now you need to keep the tarp in place for longer stretches of time and it gets annoying.
I believe that is the point he was making. 90 foot balloons aren't exactly discrete and if they were ever used for spying, their shelf life would be extremely low with a high probability of ending up being seized by whoever you were spying on, on top of it. Maybe you have some self detonation mechanism on board, but now you also are sending something which could be perceived to be a weapon. It's just really not a logical concept, at all.
The new balloons fly extremely high, up to 80K feet, near the edge of space, where planes cannot reach. And planes that can reach, can't slow down enough to reach out and grab an object.
We've known about them and spy drones for ages, it's not new, it's just the news cycle. Saying they aren't real (or are some grand political distraction) because they are suddenly in the news cycle is just ignorant.
You can mount a lot more equipment a lot higher up on a balloon, and it can float places you can't legally drive.
The, in theory, purpose of such a balloon is going to be something like satellite surveillance but low and in the are long enough to use certain types of sensors that would not work that high up, or that can now penetrate much further into the ground.
Not that I really think there's much to be worried about, as even if this is the case its more "nations who's only war will be miserable nuclear fire pretending there's a chance it could be others", but there is absolutely a plausible reason for these.
There’s an element of overreaction here (when isn’t there?), but this also isn’t true: you can’t exactly drive onto missile bases in Montana and take pictures without causing significant problems.
You can't drive into Area 51. Spy balloons can loiter and be hard to detect due to a low radar cross section, unlike satellites which fly over on set schedules. Consumer drones cannot fly high, are easy to detect, and have very limited endurance.
Genuine question: Were any of these balloons floating over something restricted like that?
The point I should have said was "Were any of these flying over a restricted area that couldn't have been easily checked out by a drone? If not this seems like an unlikely spy mission, or at best a poorly-planned one."
Spy balloons like the one we shot down have incredibly large radar cross sections; they just get deleted by radar algorithms because they move so slowly.
From the article, a good explanation for why recent incidents used missiles rather than the cannons (among other reasons):
“In 1998, a rogue weather balloon from Canada deployed to measure ozone levels accidentally drifted away. BBC reported at the time that the airship was the size of a 25-story building and was operating at an altitude between 27,000 and 37,000 feet, so admittedly much lower than China’s balloon is now.
The incursion prompted attempts from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to shoot it down, with two Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornet fighters firing more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from their own Vulcan cannons into the balloon off the coast of Newfoundland. That balloon took days to come down, at one point even gaining altitude and drifting across Canada and then out over the Atlantic Ocean, which made for a problematic situation for regional air traffic.”
60,000 feet is about 11 miles. You could get closer to a lot of interesting sites by driving around in an RV full of listening equipment + launch small (difficult to detect) drones to get even closer.
Can you do your plan without any human on foreign soil? We're dealing with a repressive communist regime who fears its own citizens. If there's a technological solution that doesn't involve a human element.
If it was the other way around - US trying to drive an RV around China to gather intel - it would be problematic because they'd notice it and shut it down. But sending someone(s) over here to drive an RV around seems pretty easy to pull off.
I wasn’t clear enough. Communist China is scared of its own spies. Doesn’t trust them. If they can replace them with convoluted Rude Goldberg esque flying balloons, they will.
I dare say if spy balloons became a real thing (speculating), there would be plenty of people saying "Wow they can't even detect a balloon, how can we be confident they find drones or stop people driving near military bases".
The opening says that the three objects have "now confirmed to have been 'commercial or benign'", but that isn't true. It seems to be based on this quote from the White House: "The intelligence community is considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose."[1] I was surprised that a seemingly thorough article would make such a mistake, but MSNBC also headlined their own reporting of this statement as "White House says 3 downed objects were commercial or benign."[2] Not great.
Scroll down to the press briefing. It’s not literally Joe Biden, but it’s his mouthpiece making statements and answering more than a few questions (and being surprisingly playful) on many issues, including this one.
That website is great. Would love to hear from the President himself on this issue that’s dominated the national conversation for over a week. Would be excellent if he’d answer a few questions as well.
The briefing from the 13th (now on the second page of that site) was extremely detailed and focused on this topic. Worth reading if you’d like to know more. But be prepared for a fair amount of “we don’t know yet.”
The question you raised (“can we hear directly from the President?”) does get asked, although the answer is basically “we can’t speak for the President’s speaking schedule, but he’s closely involved in the decision making.”
Personally, I don’t see what hearing from Biden directly would add.
Excellent. Would love to hear from the Commander in Chief on incursions into our airspace. Would be great if he answered questions, considering many people have them. Would be amazing to hear from the person we voted for who is the final decisionmaker for these decisions about national security.
Edit: Coming from a military family, and given that military action has been taken, I strongly believe the American people should be hearing from their Commander in Chief. I don’t accept John Kirby’s excuses. Joe Biden should be the person talking about military action taken against a geopolitical rival, not John Kirby.
Caveat: if you come from a military family you know what the president says in press briefs is to satisfy media, not disseminate information. For obvious reasons.
Regardless, the president DID brief about the original incident. Is what you're trying to convey that you would feel safer or more validated if there where continued briefings for the other objects?
No point for CIC to put egg on his face to the entire geopolitical landscape by saying "we shot down some US domestic commercial balloons".
The only thing they know for certain is that they're not aliens, though it's curious how they can be so certain of that when they don't know anything else about the objects.
It's misleading to put this on US Airforce only. If it's over Canadian airspace, they ordered it through NORAD or approved it.
It was also to be expected not all of these discovered objects were from foreign state or malicious actors. There's a reason the radar filtered out so much before.
> Meanwhile we have a chemical disaster in Ohio that’s killed untold amount of animals, fish, wildlife in a 10 mile + radius…
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything on this topic, and I think the Federal Government which spends trillions a year can do more than 1 thing at a time. Statements like this are like saying Apple can't focus on the new iPhone or Apple Music at the same time. It's a ridiculous political trope.
Yeah, they did a spectacular job of distracting the media so the Navy could grab the important bits of the actual spy balloon without being hounded. Making a bunch of hoo-rah never-been-in-the-military-but-I'm-really-tough Congressfolk look bad is just icing on the cake.
This [1] article has some bemusing details on the third engagement of the Great Balloon War of 2023. The relatively immobile balloon was the size of a small car, and it took two $400k missiles to pop it, after the first one missed. So I think the answer of how it works is, "not easily"!
Because it's designed for a hot, metallic jet at 400knots, at several miles away. How radar reflective is latex or whatever rubber makes up these balloons? How hot is the payload? If you make the heat-seeking missile too willing to lock onto low grade heat sources, it might suddenly decide that a bird is a better target at the wrong time.
For radar guided munitions, the surface you are targeting needs to reflect enough of the radar energy for the seeker head to "see" it.
Also is the AIM-9X really only $400k? That's insane for the capabilities it has.
“[Balloons] have extremely small radar and thermal cross sections, making them relatively invulnerable to most traditional tracking and targeting method".
IR and semi active radar guided? As in not really designed to shoot down baloons. The baloon hardly has an IR signature. I'd say it's a pretty good missile if it did the job with 50% failure rate despite being designed for something else.
Baloons and small drones should be downed with lasers. Like cut in half or something like that.
Using expensive missiles is a form of power projection. It tells the adversary we are willing to outspend them 1000 to 1. Sometimes there is a logical answer to why we are spending too much money.
Also bullets work just fine, they just cause slow leaks that could take hours to ground the craft, which might not be what you want.
Canon rounds aren't great for balloon targets. It's quite likely that a balloon doesn't offer enough resistance to trigger the fuzes, which leaves you with a bunch of live rounds falling ~40k feet and hitting whatever is below. While self-destructing rounds do exist for the M61 20mm canon, they aren't cleared for aircraft use, only for ground-based use.
Arguments around force projection are certainly going to be popular inside the beltway. At a certain point the deficit does become a national security concern, and announcing to our adversaries that they can exacerbate that timeline with incredibly inexpensive balloons is no longer "projecting" anything that resembles "power"
My brother in Uncle Sam, we’re only one week into this “crisis”, which is widely overinflated. China is posturing about balloons in its own South China Sea, while America is gassed up about balloons over the Alaskan heartland. This is the posturing phase, and a missile or three is a rounding error in the US defense budget. I don’t see the economy losing buoyancy yet.
Bullets (20 mm cannon shells) could work to an extent. But they are short ranged and require the fighter aircraft to get close to the target at a high closure rate. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using guided missiles is much safer.
well they are air to air missiles and are more designed to hit an airplane with a giant engine (that gives a nice bright ir signature) and <30k ft rather than a cold object at 80k ft. if I had to guess it's probably just a software bug.
I think they made a mistake by not considering the size of the balloons. There is huge difference between the large spy balloon and this small balloon. The payload of the former was bigger than envelop of latter. They should have been able to tell from the radar but definitely from the fighter. Most concerning is that nobody thought about it and the response seems to have been panicked.
I think these are 'better safe than sorry' cases, and that as more data rolls in they will re-calibrate. Look at it in an adversarial way: whoever wants to spy on the US could easily try to make the gear small enough that it would be taken for something innocent, and then to use a satellite uplink to move the payload off to the mothership. The question isn't really whether or not this particular balloon was a mistake or not. The question is what the minimum size is of a balloon that is still a viable spying platform. I don't have the answer to that question, but I've seen some pretty impressive miniaturized gear that I think you could easily take up with a small balloon, enough to be worried about it from a counter espionage point of view.
The fighter can only slow down to like 180 knots, while the balloon might be blowing around at 10-90 knots depending on where exactly it is. How close do you have to be with the Mark 1 eyeball to actually disambiguate this kind of target, how long would you actually be at that range in a fly-by, and how many fly-bys are you willing to do before "whatever, we will just apologize to the NOAA or a college somewhere" and shoot it down.
Maybe the targeting pod could give you a zoomed up view, but it's not really designed for nearly stationary, high altitude objects.
As a side note, if the theory of the pico balloon is correct, then the US airforce is capable of radar-identify a 32" diameter mylar balloon and shoot it with a missile from a fighter jet, which seems to me like being exceptionally accurate.
Radar capability is interesting, but I'm curious if small balloons are really that hard of a target to shoot down once you've found it. They are slow-moving, non evasive, and virtually any impact from shrapnel will be a guaranteed kill. So it seems like you wouldn't even have to be that accurate, if the missile was designed to explode at its closest point.
That said, they did miss on the first attempt with the Lake Huron balloon, so I guess it's harder then I'd have thought.
The problem is in targeting. No missile works on computer vision. There are older guided bombs that use "TV guidance" but I don't think that's even close to the same.
It either needs a hot part for an IR seeker to lock on to, or be radar reflective enough that a high power radar beam can reflect off and be picked up by the missile's antenna and pass a certain threshold of reflected power. There's not much heat in the payloads, and balloons probably aren't the best radar reflectors.
Even gun lead calculations require a good radar return.
I've always predicted we would eventually end up with missiles that guide on visible light, but that's terrifying if it isn't nearly perfect.
The F22's publicly claimed radar cross section is "the size of a bumble bee". It would make sense we build missiles that can attempt to approach targeting that.
is a potential problem - we yanked that in Australia after the events known as "The Dismissal" in which a broadly popular Prime Minister was removed by the GG because ( .. long twisty stories of political issues | contraversy | conspiracy | possible CIA dabbling | etc ... ).
> we yanked that in Australia after the events known as "The Dismissal"
I don’t believe we did. The governor general still has the power to dissolve the house of representatives in the constitution which is remarkably hard to change.
> The Governor-General may appoint such times for holding the sessions of the Parliament as he thinks fit, and may also from time to time, by Proclamation or otherwise, prorogue the Parliament, and may in like manner dissolve the House of Representatives.
I'd have to dig about but I do recall there were changes to the fine print that added guard rails to the GG's powers to independantly do such things.
Eg: Most recently the GG "sanctified" | "blessed" | "made official" the extra and additional ministerial roles taken on by the former Prime Minister (Scotty from Marketing) but that wasn't (IIRC) an independent action by the GG, just an official Head of State recognition of a decision already made by the political body.
I think that the very fine print in Australia these days is that even if the GG refuses to perform these official blessings they go ahead anyway, and I don't think such things can be keep secret anymore either after Scotty's bit of non transparent role expansion.
I freely confess to be a lot more on the ball about all that 15 odd years back and really not caring much these days though.
I think you are right the Canadian Armed Forces won't actually follow the orders of the King/Queen. But when I look for the actual reason, it basically amounts to "fuck you that's why" and that the monarch realizes they don't have the leverage. The military swears an oath to the Monarch and indeed the governor general is only acting, in theory, as an executor on behalf of the monarch and the monarch retains commander-in-chief in parallel.
You have the Nord Stream pipeline story which IMHO is credible and if true, has the US sabotaging its European allies with illegal unauthorized military operations; you have the story in Ohio — and the media ignores both to talk about balloons and aliens.
Once again this take is horseshit. Front page of r/news has 3 Ohio train stories, another story about a different train derailment, and ZERO balloon stories. Yesterday it was 7 ohio train stories and 2 balloon stories.
If you aren't seeing "the media" talk about this, it's because you choose to consume garbage media sources.
One of my first thoughts when the Chinese balloon thing happened was that there's going to be hysteria and some high school kids science experiment is going to be taken down.
I don't understand how people always reach for aliens or cloak & dagger stuff when in reality the most likely explanation is that you have some Doctor Strangelove characters running around in the bureaucracy.
I can't say that I saw the over-reaction coming, but it was pretty clear by the third balloon that it was happening. I will say that I already had the thought listening to some of the more hawkish types that I could very easily imagine them screaming, "we must not have a balloon gap!" to some authority or other.
„Since the AIM-9L model, which made its debut in the late 1970s, Sidewinders have been “all-aspect" missiles, which means they can pick out the heat of the skin of target against an ambient background instead of just hot exhaust parts of the engine“ [1]
Apparently, against the cold background of the sky, a slightly warmed balloon is visible enough.
> Also, I wonder how the heat seeking missile can track such a small and low thermal object. Must be one hell of a sensor.
A discussion thread somewhere a couple days ago said they're not really "heat seeking" but object-tracking from a video feed, and the video camera just happens (well, deliberately because it works better) to use IR bands instead of visible bands.
Some people may be confused because originally the AIM-9 literally was a heat seeker and could only lock onto hot targets. The later models introduced after about 1977 use a completely different seeker and are far more capable.
If you've ever played with an IR camera, there's plenty to be seen. It would be quite hard to have a balloon without significant contrast with the background of the sky. Especially if it had running electronics. Consumer sensors can detect a fraction of a degree difference.
The pico balloon's electronics run so little and so infrequently, they're not likely to be generating noticeable heat. The solar panel itself, a big black-ish object just hanging in the sun, would be nice and warm just like an equivalent rectangle of black paper would, though.
I think the envelope is gonna be the much more visible target. At high altitude silhouetted against the blackness of space, the balloon itself will be considerably warmer, even in what we consider "cold" air. Or if you're looking down on it from above, silhouetted against the warm ground, it will be quite cold.
Also the mylar, which I presume is aluminized, is a heck of a radar reflector.
Air at 30,000 ft is -50 F. You need, even for a very small box, heating measured in watts to keep your electronics at a temperature where they'll function. Even if you didn't, even tiny amounts of heating are going to be visible. The electronics box will look like a lighthouse beacon in IR.
Source: have launched small electronics to 100,000 ft on a weather balloon.
> These floater balloons often use only solar panels, no batteries. Batteries were dropped from the projects early on because they have limited charging cycles before they stop accepting a charge, especially in the harsh temps at altitude, -40F/-40C or worse. When the battery stops accepting a charge, it ends telemetry from the mission. So they only report telemetry during daylight, when the sun is at a high enough angle to illuminate the tiny solar panels. In the Arctic winter, the days are short and the sun might not get high enough to wake up the electronics.
>Unlike latex or rubber weather balloons which inflate and stretch as they rise into lower atmospheric pressures, these mylar balloons can't stretch, so their fully inflated ground size will be the same as their size at high altitudes, meaning the pico balloon won't get much bigger than 32".
The parts that mention expansion say they're referring to latex balloons.
It should be noted (since "over Canada" could give the impression of an invasive action, and the article makes no further clarification) that it was Canadian PM Trudeau who gave the order for this object to be shot down, and explicitly authorized US planes to do so if they reached it first.
I have no desire to vouch for the sibling comment (currently dead), but not being Canadian I was curious about their claim (I don't generally track budget details of other countries, sorry).
Trudeau has been the Canadian PM since 2015 (end of year) and other, than 2016 and 2019, military spending has gone up every year. Over his time as PM there has been a net increase in military spending. The biggest jump was $4.5 billion in 2017, from $17.74 billion to $22.27 billion.
It's interesting to see claims targeting a particular politician show up that are so easily shown to be false. What's the point?
I think the point is that the Canadian military has been due for tons and tons of upgrades and needs a lot of new equipment. That goes for the navy, but especially for the airforce. Just maintaining a constant spend (relative to GDP) is not enough when you have tons of 40-50 year old equipment (ships, airplanes, vehicules) all reaching their end of life at the same time. He also slashed some procurement programs (a new F-35 fleet, some ships) very early on that would've turned out to be very, very useful in retrospect.
(I personally don't think we should spend anything but the bare minimum in defense here in Canada, since we obviously depend on our neighbors anyways. But that's the argument for saying that Trudeau neglected the armed forces, as far as I understand it).
One would need more information about the exact chain of events. Did NORAD call (not necessarily an actual telephone call) Trudeau and say "Mr. Prime Minister, we have an unidentified object in this location and we recommend to take it down. What is your decision?", "Here's the object and the following options: shoot, follow, let go. What is your decision?", or "Here's the object. What's your decision?" Yes, Trudeau gave the order, but his judgment was undoubtedly influenced by the substance and the manner of the information provided to him and his advisors. It gets more complicated if Trudeau debated the matter with members of his cabinet, as he almost certainly did.
> You make it sound like Trudeau did a noble thing here when he had no other option.
I honestly don't know how I could have made my clarifying the basic context of the story sound more politically neutral. Maybe you have some suggestions?
The question of why US forces are being called upon to shoot objects in Canadian airspace is hardly off topic on a post about US forces shooting down objects in Canadian airspace.
Due to NORAD, Canada and the continental U.S. are a shared air defense zone.
In this case, USAF had been tracking/following the balloon since before it crossed from Alaska into the Yukon, so they although F-18s from Cold Lake had been dispatched, the U.S. F-22s already on-scene took the shot.
Canada has openly encouraged US air power in it's air space since the cold war. They really like the idea of sharing defense with the US. We have a bunch of early warning radars in their territory, and share lots of info about them.
There are strict rules about their mass and density. Basically the payload has to be smaller and softer than a bird, and the string can't be too strong either.
While I'm not disagreeing that these rules exist, but I have not seen them. I say this as someone that did quite a bit of research before actually doing an amateur weather balloon launch myself. I would like see what your definition of a bird is that the payload must be smaller than, because birds come in all sizes. My payload was the size of a small tackle box. Slightly smaller than the footprint of the 15" MBP that I'm typing currently typing this message. It was about 4.5"-5" tall as well. It was made out of whatever type of plastic. Now, I've never been hit by a bird or a plastic tackle box, but I'm thinking the tackle box would not qualify as softer than a bird either.
So, if you have a link to these strict rules that are defined as you've stated, I'd love to read them just to know exactly how bad I broke the laws (shut up Beavis).
(i) Carries a payload package that weighs more than four pounds and has a weight/size ratio of more than three ounces per square inch on any surface of the package, determined by dividing the total weight in ounces of the payload package by the area in square inches of its smallest surface;
(ii) Carries a payload package that weighs more than six pounds;
(iii) Carries a payload, of two or more packages, that weighs more than 12 pounds; or
(iv) Uses a rope or other device for suspension of the payload that requires an impact force of more than 50 pounds to separate the suspended payload from the balloon."
Translation: To be exempt from the rules of high altitude balloons your balloon must have no more then two payloads at 6lb per payload, cord no stronger than 50lb (fairly weak / most fishing line is too strong), and not be too dense.
Your payload sounds probably fine unless it contains a chunk of tungsten for some reason.
There's also a maximum balloon size and some other rules worth reviewing.
Those definitely read much more like what I remember reading. I definitely remember reading about the dual payload as at one point, we thought that might be something we might try.
The references to size of birds and softness definitely was questioning my recollection of the rules I had read.
Purely out of curiosity, the article mentions that one of these balloons has circled the globe several times. Do you need to follow other countries laws or has it never really been a problem until now?
Seems like the type of issue which would normally be solved with politics. If it happens enough to “bubble up” the bureaucracy, then diplomats could request a change in another countries behavior. If it was particularly important, economic pressure could be applied or delaying/holding up deals/votes that the offending nation cares more about than they care about violating our rules.
Well, you see what happens when your balloon doesn't follow the rules ;-) So, if you didn't check with each country's rules and regulations before plotting your course, you only have yourself to blame with it gets slammed with an AIM-9 missile.
Getting my balloon slammed with a missile wouldn't be my concern, it'd be sad that the balloon was destroyed before it's time but it was released to eventually crash. It's getting a warrant sent to me or getting a bill for a missile that would concern me.
And there's no real indication this balloon didn't follow the rules, neither of us know what Canada's rules are.
It depends on the total mass. At low masses, nothing, as the collision risk is low. As mass increase regulations on design become applicable that include maximum payload separation force, NOTAMs on launch, radar reflectors, and eventually the balloon is just considered an aircraft.
Why do you hate do it? It was a question. I'm not opposed to an answer. (Yes, I know it's an expression... but what is it expressing? I guess the downvoters are frustrated with my question for some reason).
The balloon itself pops, it's not reusable. It's nice to pick up the litter if you can get it out of the tree or whatever, but it's latex so it'll degrade.
The payloads are usually in great shape unless they come down in a road and get run over. My local launch site flies RS41's and you can find photos all over the internet. There's two lithium AA's inside, a couple of STM32s, and a Ublox GPS receiver.
Getting into it, just pop onto sondehub a bit past noon or midnight UTC and see what's in the air. If there's one predicted to land near you, keep an eye on it and head out. If a sondehub feeder station is nearby, you'll hear it down pretty close to the ground, and the landing prediction will usually be spot-on. If the nearest station is still a long ways off, then you'll lose it at the station's horizon which may be several hundred meters up, and what happens in the terminal phase of descent is anyone's guess.
To improve this, become your own station. There's a list of receivers on the right sidebar if you click the help button. I threw rdzTTGOsonde on a random Heltec lora board I had sitting around; the board was wired for 915MHz and the sondes use 404MHz which comes in the 433MHz Rx chain. The supported_boards page says:
> The 868/915 MHz version contains the SX1276 receiver chip. The chip supports both 433 MHZ and 868/915 MHz, but using different input pins. The board connects the antenna to the 868/915 MHZ input pin, the 433 MHz pin is unconnected. Theoretically the 868/915 MHZ version can be modified to work as 403 MHz receiver by directly connecting the antenna to the right pin of the chip, but this requires somewhat advanced SMD soldering skills...
And this sonde was polite enough to come down in a parking lot where I could literally drive up to it. I didn't even get out of the car to grab it: https://i.imgur.com/qMTVhR3.jpg
(I did get out a few seconds later to pick up the balloon and throw it away.)
It is not that it is unlikely but that the consequences would be very low. There are limits on the density and the mass of the balloon. If an aircraft hits it the same happens as if your car hits a butterfly.
The butterfly dies and your car won’t even notice it.
The relevant exceptions are in cfr 14 part 101.1.4:
(4) Except as provided for in § 101.7 , any unmanned free balloon that-
(i) Carries a payload package that weighs more than four pounds and has a weight/size ratio of more than three ounces per square inch on any surface of the package, determined by dividing the total weight in ounces of the payload package by the area in square inches of its smallest surface;
(ii) Carries a payload package that weighs more than six pounds;
(iii) Carries a payload, of two or more packages, that weighs more than 12 pounds; or
(iv) Uses a rope or other device for suspension of the payload that requires an impact force of more than 50 pounds to separate the suspended payload from the balloon.
These balloons are compliant with regulations that were developed to minimize the hazard of collision. It is the nature of aviation that other objects exist in the sky and can cause a hazard.
Neither the pile of money or the ladies are a direct result of launching weather balloons though, so I left those details out as they weren't exactly relevant. You know, keep it classy
You're reaching too far. Munitions are expensive, stockpiles are finite, and the US government does not like to (and cannot quickly) increase the rate of production from the low peacetime rate. If using munitions translated immediately into increasing production, the US wouldn't be drawing down emergency stockpiles from around the world to supply Ukraine with 155mm artillery ammunition.
> When you give the military free reign to use sidewinders domestically, suddenly they are burning them up at half a million dollars a pop.
No, they are using the cheapest weapon most likely to work, given the public/political demand that "something" be done. It is not an ideal weapon to deal with balloons, but it (clearly) mostly works.
> They even somehow "missed" one of the shots too, that didn't get too much coverage.
It's not surprising. The sidewinder is designed to track aircraft, and ignore decoys (e.g. flares). Balloons don't look like aircraft, they don't move like aircraft, they don't have a significant thermal signature (some contrast, when approached from ahead/below with clear (cold) sky behind them), and they definitely don't have the kind of IR/UV signature that dual-band seekers (like the Stinger or SA-18 have) are looking for. The reason to use the sidewinder is that the other missile carried by US interceptors, the AMRAAM, is both way more expensive, and requires some sort of radar signature (and likely some sort of "plane-like" flight characteristics, to avoid decoys like chaff) that a balloon without a radar reflector is not going to have.
First, the US isn’t going to shoot down small balloons like this one after possibly shooting 3 civilian ones. They will only react to larger ones.
Second, what kind of useful sensors will they put on small balloon? I guess might be able to fit camera, even long lens, in the 12lb payload of small balloon but doubt get much useful info.
Third, we may see a movement to put transponders in larger balloons. Requiring ADS-B would be reasonable.
