The original is particularly bad for me. Goes strait to a pay form and hijacks my back button. I couldn’t figure out how to get out of it and had to close the site and reopen HN. I wish these sites were banned here and I need to finally get an extension or something to ban myself from clicking them.
In Firefox, you just need to left-click and hold the back button to get a list that allows you to go back to any of several earlier pages. Pretty handy.
Occasionally even that hasn't saved me, but I suppose it's pretty close to the optimal UI. Maybe it just needs to partition the history entries by domain to defeat the sites that spam the hell out of your history.
Yeah it can be annoying depending on if the glass is half full or half empty YMMV. Myself I know such sites won't waste my bandwidth loading a script that won't really run if it doesn't get what it wants, I won't sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while some background thing pretends to do something, they (the site) won't get to scape the IP, not any stats that I was interested in whatever it was, nor get to reach for the cookie jar ... they don't win. There's usually more agreeable sites but not always. Despite that, it really puts a smile on my face.
Or an airplane, or a drone flown out of a parking lot nearby, or frankly even a google maps photo. I agree, the threat here seems sorta vague and silly. Aerial reconnaissance over industrialized democracies is a pretty wide open threat model. If we have stuff sitting out in the back yards we should throw a tarp on it or something.
Tracking: satellites are incredibly easy to track once you know their orbital parameters. A balloon, far less so. You need a lot of active tracking.
Altitude: a balloon is much closer to the ground than a satellite. That allows a much smaller camera to take the same picture. It also could give you access to radio signals that might not be as easily monitored from space.
Harder to spot: being closer to the ground, it will be beyond the horizon until it's much closer.
And of course it's far, far cheaper. The Chinese space program is doing well, but it's still very expensive to build and launch satellites.
Measure Response: Determine what an adversary nation does in response to the violation (what resources are scrambled, where do they come from etc)
Messaging: All the permutations of two sets of government folks trying to send a message the pair mutually understand re: defense etc
Tie up resources: Low cost provocation may divert higher cost resources and tie them up for a longer period of time since its a dwelling threat
Acquire signal information: Use sensors and measurement systems outside of the threat to measure the locations and signatures of tracking systems deployed to assess and monitor the threat
Deploy lightweight physical payloads: dust something of interest over an area etc
I wonder what kinds of capabilities you could have in a $25,000 mass produced balloon. 100,000 of those would only cost $2.5 billion. It seems like that would be a pretty overwhelming problem to deal with if your job was to suddenly get rid of 100,000 balloons.
A sufficiently large balloon with enough payload capacity (and some method of data link back to its operators) would probably be more useful for SIGINT and rf spectrum data gathering, assuming it has directional antennas aimed at whatever is directly underneath it. Same capability in a LEO satellite weighing 500kg+ might be very costly to launch.
It's fascinating getting a glimpse into modern tensions. It turns out that there was a guy that shot down like 8 MiG's back in the 40's, but they had to suppress all knowledge of it so that it didn't escalate anything between US and Russia. Makes you wonder how often stuff like this happens and we just never hear about it. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/20/asia/korean-war-fighter-pilot...
This was my first thought as well. I'm kind of surprised the media is making such a big deal out of this. I would assume, considering how cheap it is to make a stratospheric balloon, it is either fairly common and the US has an equivalent program or its completely inferior to satellites.
Wasn't one theory about Roswell that it was some kind of test balloon with crash test dummies? Something about testing for radiation in the upper atmosphere back before everyone and their brother knew how to make a gun style nuclear device?
(Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)
Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature.
Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.
"On a cold November day in 1952" (linked article, paragraph 2)
> a guy
"Royce Williams" (linked article, literally the first two words), Navy Cross recipient and former US Navy pilot, not 'some guy'.
What kind of hasty carelessness causes you to share a link to a story, embellish it with details, but just screw up on key facts? Including, I might add, the rather significant difference in implication between a US pilot shooting down MiGs in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was either an ally or a peacetime enemy, vs. the 1950s, when the Korean War happened.
It was 70-80 years ago and you were off by about 2 years. Inconsequential.
It makes zero difference to the meat of the story exactly how man Migs were shot down. The precise number is not the story.
You didn't say 'some guy' you said 'a guy', which has a different connotation.
2018 and 2020 were just two years apart, and no significant difference in the world economy or health indicators took place across the interval. (/not)
But getting this stuff wrong takes more effort than just copying the actual facts from the article you are providing a link to!
And just referring to a person who is named and credentialed in the article as 'a guy' just seems like throwing a layer of extra carelessness on top.
I just can't fathom how someone accomplishes this.
If there's one thing I try to encourage people to do in online discourse in general, it's to recognize that you don't have to guess. You have time to go look up the facts. Things are knowable, you don't have to vaguely gesture in the direction of the truth.
And in this case the op had the source right there! They must have googled up the link and opened the page and copied the URL! The facts were right there, in the next tab!
>I just can't fathom how someone accomplishes this.
Person wakes up and browses interesting stories, remembers semi-relevant story, decides to comment about the similarity and forgets specifics. Realizes right before posting "oh shit I have to cite my sources or else pedants will ratio me into being unable to participate in other conversations" and quickly searches for a recent link that mostly backs up their commentary. Does not think to fact check every detail. Backfires.
Three years make all the difference. 1949 would rogue pilot almost causing a war. 1952 is pilot bravely saving lives and being covered up so didn't expand war.
The numbers matter too. Shooting down MIGs happened all the time. Dogfighting seven solo and shooting down four is a huge thing.
It was during the Korean war, in the active warzone, and the Russian pilots were flying North Korean planes. It's a pretty important point, because this is dramatically different to a US pilot randomly shooting down Migs over Europe in 1949 and that being suppressed!
According to a Pentagon source, the balloon offers "limited additive value" over satellites.
More interesting excerpts:
>The incident, which occurred in the last two days, marked the latest aggressive Chinese intelligence gathering maneuvers in recent years. U.S. defense officials said the balloon loitered over the U.S. longer than in previous similar incidents, which made this “different.”
<snip>
> Mr. Biden was presented with options and proposed that the high-altitude balloon be shot down after it was spotted and reported by civilians in a commercial airliner, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon feared civilian casualties, and opted not to shoot down the balloon, U.S. officials said.
<snip>
> The balloon “was traveling at an altitude well above the commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground,” Gen. Ryder added.
<snip>
> The balloon was observed flying over Montana after flying over Canada and the Aleutian Islands, one U.S. official said. It was large enough for its debris to cause damage, and while the U.S. considered shooting it down over a sparsely populated area of Montana, the U.S. opted to not shoot it down. It also flew over sensitive sites, a senior defense official told reporters Thursday.
That project was cancelled after 5 tests, at least one successful. Since satellite destruction is a pretty interesting tactical option, what does that imply?
I don't think so. I don't know what altitude its at but I imagine aerodynamic control surfaces would not be that effective. F-22 would be better, which is what we deployed.
It's not possible to give it a slow enough leak that it comes down gently? A sufficiently large balloon is basically a parachute even if it's not inflated, right? It would be great to catch it and see what's inside...
I think that's the issue- bullet holes will only cause a small leak, and then the balloon will slowly descend in an unpredictable place (i.e., might blanket a small town)
>According to a Pentagon source, the balloon offers "limited additive value" over satellites.
Uh... no?
Mainly because satellites are known -- black sites like Area 51 reguarly put away the "good stuff" when they known a spy satellite is overhead. That's not possible for random Chinese balloons we only find out about when some commercial pilot phones them in.
> According to a Pentagon source, the balloon offers "limited additive value" over satellites.
Why wouldn't we prioritize simply acquiring the thing for analysis of what sort of optics and other capabilities they're floating through our air-space?
Who cares what "limited additive value" we presume it to have over satellites.
It's a huge psyops value, and a huge opportunity to demonstrate we can trivially acquire and reverse such items if they'd like to send us more of their state of the art surveillance gadgets to take apart.
By not doing so we imply that's not something we're capable of. Not a good look at all.
How did it do that? It demonstrated swift aerial response until a potential threat is assessed. Once assessed as not a threat, note the cuteness of the toy.
Will you keep digging this hole if the same low-cost trolling of the US military recurs with a similarly disproportionately expensive response? How many times?
I’d want a tax refund if someone has not been tasked with figuring out how to do a discreet nondestructive takedown for analysis.
I don’t think it’s trivial though. The slow speed makes use of aircraft tricky. The thing may have countermeasures, like a self-destruct mechanism for if it detects anything approaching it. Perhaps not an explosive self-destruct (flying explosives over a foreign country would be brazen indeed), but perhaps something electronic that scuttles the interesting equipment. And finally, perhaps the response to its presence is precisely what its owners have sent it to observe. An up-close streaming webcam view of a US Air Force operation surely has some value.
>Why wouldn't we prioritize simply acquiring the thing for analysis of what sort of optics and other capabilities they're floating through our air-space?
Because there's a good chance America's three letter agencies have that figured out already anyway and the thing is technically ten years out of date.
Conducting some potentially risky and costly shootdown of a balloon over US territory seems out of proportion.
> Because there's a good chance America's three letter agencies have that figured out already anyway and the thing is technically ten years out of date.
Scrambling F-22s to intercept something harmless we understand so deeply makes no sense.
> Conducting some potentially risky and costly shootdown of a balloon over US territory seems out of proportion.
I didn't say anything about shooting it down. But if that's the US's only option, it speaks volumes to how incapable we are of handling such a threat without undue risk to ourselves. Embarrassing if so.
> Why wouldn’t we prioritize simply acquiring the thing for analysis of what sort of optics and other capabilities they’re floating through our air-space?
One hypothesis: because we got high-resolution photographs of it, identified it, and we already have comprehensive intelligence and possibly one or more captured examples of the model, so we don’t expect there to be any particular intelligence value of getting another one.
> By not doing so we imply that’s not something we’re capable of.
I thought the Drive's article was pretty good including details of a Canadian flight to (presumably) check on the balloon as it went over the Okanagon roughly.
Similar balloons appear to have been photographed in Hawaii, India (Andamans), Japan. A different type was recently photographed over the Philippines and there is a comment about use over Guam.
Reminder that the capital of Idaho, Boise, is (apochraphally) named for the trees (les bois) that surround the Boise river. French made it quite a ways west, and definitely made it as far as Idaho.
The story goes Owyhee County is named after Hawaii. It's a county southwest of the Boise Area and home to the most beautiful wilderness I have ever seen. There is nothing like hiking mile after mile out there under the hot summer sun never seeing another living soul... But I digress. The story goes some Hawaiian goat herders entered the area to try their luck and were never to be seen again and hence the name. Owyhee = Hawaii
How true it is I do it know but it's what I've always been told.
Yeah, there are sites where these are being looked into. I'm not sure its the same thing you mean, but you can bet there are plenty of eager guys out there making sure these cams aren't going to waste.
Legally, if I bring it down, can I keep it? What if I call the CIA and tell them "Hey, I spent $5K bringing it down, but I'll gladly sell you it for $10K"?
If you can get something to above 65k feet and conduct some sort of kinetic action against a small moving target for only 5k dollars I'm sure lots of us defense contractor UAV manufacturers would like to hire you or license your technology.
In the High power rocketry hobby, properly certified, $5k will get you high enough. Guidance is something else, I think you could do it, the knowledge is there and available. It would take many $5k test flights to get it working however.
Sufficiently advanced hobby grade model rocketry with guidance system and kinetic effect payload might start to resemble an ITAR controlled missile technology item (and/or something the ATF would be interested in for USA domestic destructive device and munitions laws).
This makes me wonder what else of interest occurs in that desert throughout the year? Is there anything preventing someone from just camping there year-round to enjoy the spectacles?
It's where all the private individual owners of the biggest military equipment you can buy in the US go to shoot their equipment that would be basically illegal to shoot anywhere else.
There are limits to how long you can camp in a single spot on public land, but no law against travelling around and camping in different areas as long as you want.
Guidance is a big no no because it’s bad for the whole hobby. We basically self govern so not to cause problems. People work on active vertical stabilization systems which is basically guidance for going straight up. No one attempts guidance to a specific destination because it’s a good way to put the whole hobby at risk. However, the skill and know how is there. People are putting passive stabilized rockets to 280k feet in black rock. A guy in Austin have active stabilization working above mach 1. It can be done within the hobby but no one wants to do it.
There's a recent Veritasium video, where they were trying to demonstrate tungsten "rods from gods" space weapons by dropping heavy weights from a helicopter.
When they asked an expert about the aiming issue, the response was basically laughter and "I'm not going to solve the precision guided munitions problem for you because of legal reasons, and you're not going to be able to figure it out."
I expect precision guided rocketry is going to be a lot harder than a chunk of steel barely high enough to reach terminal velocity.
It’s not really that hard to figure out, unfortunately. It gets trickier for moving targets… but it’s still not that hard. These days, the easiest way is just to use a neural network trained in a simulator. You don’t even have to understand the math or even fully grep the sensor/image processing. The methods used for conventional targeting systems are actually pretty well documented.
Hobbiests are already making self landing (spacex-style) model rockets. That is a much harder problem.
That Veritasium video is probably the worst video he ever produced. It was full of the most obvious mistakes possible along with a pointless hype. He probably felt forced to release it because he spent so much money on the failure.
AFAIK, in the US, precision guidance to a specific orientation on a amateur rocket is legal (i.e. active stabilization), but precision guidance to a specific location on a amateur rocket is indeed illegal.
Interesting. This was my take as well. I’ve been a fan of rods from god stuff for years, but his whole attempt to “recreate” was really lame. He explains physics stuff all the time, and then struggle with some simple engineering, just so they could create “suspense” around a helicopter drop. It was kinda surreal. I’m still scratching my head.
Entertainingly, mark Robert posted a video of him solving the precision guided missile problem, and realizing on talking to an expert in the field that that's what he'd been building
You might be able to bring it down with a powerful enough laser, so a cheap weather balloon and a 50w laser plus a raspberry pi with adequate connectivity, four propellers for course correction, and some servos ought to do the trick for under 1000$.
I am no expert on the upper atmosphere but I think the wind speeds at those altitudes vastly outstrip the ability of anything with batteries and electric motors to adjust its course. The only way to change directions is to rise or fall into a differently moving stream of air current. This is how the Google project loon things were supposed to navigate?
Presumably both balloons are affected by the same air currents, right? So as long as you lift it up from the right spot it should be able to get within a few kilometers of the target, no?
Didn’t some guy freefall from something like 100k ft or something to a specific landing zone. Remember seeing a red bull video of the event. How did he manage to avoid high altitude winds blowing him off course?
Think the name was Baumgartner or something like it.
your laser doesn't need to do anything to the balloon and can be as weak as a laser pointer. just aim at the cameras and zap the sensors. assuming the ability to aim and hold would be achievable at this level. who cares if it's just floating there if it is blind?
“Just aim” seems to be understating the challenge of hitting a tiny target through multiple miles of atmosphere and holding the same position long enough to damage the sensor. The laser alone seems like it would blow that $5k budget by a handy margin — not much economy of scale at that power level.
edit, however, lasing a camera sensor doesn't need a lot of holding time. so just keep bouncing it around and hopefully, eventually you'll cover enough to render useless.
Remember, I’m not saying it’s impossible - just a lot more expensive. I’m sure the U.S. military budget could include powerful lasers, precision sensors, and the software to keep focused on a small target at a long distance but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t at least two orders of magnitude more expensive.
Yes, but damage is a function of power and time. If you can’t keep it on that a precise position you need to deliver far more power — there are links here to some research and they tend to be measured in seconds, which is a very aggressive target for something this far away through moving air.
How about if it mysteriously, spontaneously fell down and you just retrieved it?
Normal private property like someone's quadcopter, I would assume the owner still has rights to it (and possibly liability depending on how/where it fell). But foreign government property that's not supposed to be there in the first place?
except, the unbelievable thing would be that someone on the ground would have the ability to cause it spontaneously fall down. i'd hope the judge would put the larger burden of proof on the prosecutors here.
Shooting down an unmanned aircraft in skies where the FAA has jurisdiction (just about all in the US) is a felony equal to shooting a manned aircraft, even hobby drones. You might not want to alert them.
It’s quite likely that was an extension of the joke, the repurposing of a comercial off the shelf item that already does the job the young inventor set out to do.
Other news sources have a lot more detail about this.
1. There's a high risk of debris falling on people on the ground.
2. Any sensitive information collected would have been sent home already, so shooting it now isn't going to do much good.
So Pentagon leadership recommended not taking "kinetic action". What's interesting is that they have been tracking it for several days over the US mainland. You'd think the strongest military in the world could do something other than...just watch.
There's more strength in demonstrating "Hey, do you want this silly balloon back?" after retrieving it without incident at negligible effort/cost.
Which is not at all what is occurring. Having flight tracks of multiple refueling tankers demonstrates far more resources have already been expended on this "not a concern to us" than was spent on deploying it...
I understand why the State Department hyperventilates over "Chinese offensive capabilities" but no normal person ever needs to. China is not a threat to everyday Americans.
You can go drive past them, even stop to use the porta-potty. (ok, maybe not recommended) I've antelope hunted over there a lot. (East of Harlowtown) and it is as empty as it gets in the contiguous US.
They could probably shoot it down without making much debris. And even if it made debris, at most it would hit a cow. The reality is it's not collecting anything of value.
Are the silos even a secret anymore? With ubiquitous satellite coverage, I assume that anything even possibly a launch site is extensively monitored. To say nothing of traditional mechanisms of gathering intelligence.
It's like a fly sitting on the windshield of your car parked in the driveway or something. It's there, it might be annoying if you think about it, but it isn't actually doing any meaningful harm.
I haven't yet seen a compelling reason to think it is either Chinese or an espionage craft anyway,other than news reporting "the Pentagon sure thinks so"
"Letting it sit", the "it" being what they're calling a "surveillance" balloon, seems absurd. If we have an ongoing MITM attack, we need to stop the attack, not simply observe it like idiots.
> what's the point of capability if you're never going to use it.
The point is to use them on a real danger. Accurate or not, the Pentagon clearly doesn’t see this ballon as a threat in any capacity. Why would they do anything other than keep an eye on it?
We have a “consequences taxonomy” we only show our hand depending on level of threat
Some bean counters decided this was low threat. And, more likely, China told us it was coming, and probably to just count silos like we’ve been doing back and forth since the 70s
The US moved Iran — the country simultaneously providing cruise missiles to Russia and modern anti-tank missiles to forces in Yemen — back a few hundred years? The 1700s must have been wild.
Iran's history is quite an interesting one if you're not familiar with it. In the 1950s Iran was a relatively secular democracy. They had a mixed relationship with the West, but it was workable. When they discovered that the West was not fairly paying oil royalties as agreed upon, they moved to nationalize their oil.
This was unacceptable to the West, so we covertly overthrew their democracy and installed an unpopular autocratic monarch in 1953. This Monarch would then rule for the next 26 years until in 1979 they would have their own "real" revolution. It was largely led by Islamic extremists, and they replaced our puppet monarchy with an Islamic theocracy. And this theocracy not only has a pretty negative view of the West, but for some reason always thinks we're trying to engage in covert actions to try to overthrow them! Go figure.
Iran's F-14s come from the Shah era, though the Reagan administration did secretly sell Iran spare parts during the 1980s, as part of a scheme to fund fascist militias in Central America without having to ask Congress for the money.
"Just watching" what they're calling a "surveillance" balloon continue to collect (somehow) information sounds unwise. That they watch it crossing the Atlantic onto U.S. territory seems especially asinine. It's as if we're more beholden to Disney shareholders than national security at this point, under the "Biden-Harris Administration".
Apart from the question why it wasn't shot down before entering airspace, sensitive information it collects is altitude wind patterns over missile sites and inability of administration to make a decision.
> There's a high risk of debris falling on people on the ground.
In Western Montana? Rather doubtful. Just wait 5 minutes until it is over national forest land, which is the vast majority of the area, and then shoot it down.
They mention in the article that the balloon only provides a marginal increase in surveillance capability when compared to LEO satellites. Considering the US pioneered a lot of satellite surveillance technology I imagine they have built everything accordingly since the 1960s and there's not much the Chinese can see from space or a balloon or I'm guessing even from a low flying Cessna.
I don't understand it here. If it's detrimental to national security shouldn't it be dealt with immediate action? I think it's a propaganda with a lot of self conflicted information.
Official explanation is BS (danger to people in sparse rural Montana) so Im guessing they dont want to create a precedent for any of their own "projects" flying around the globe.
Also military expansion in the region (e.g. the Philippines base) and direct aid to Taiwan. The problem for hawks is what everyone sober is already aware of: there aren’t many ways to contain a nuclear power with a large advanced economy next to its borders which don’t quickly end up in a pretty dark scenario.
Not that China needs to be contained anyway. The only worldwide threat to national security is the country with 800 military bases worldwide and a hundreds-of-years-long history of invading someone every few years.
Not the way America is, no. China gives loans with minimal terms to build infrastructure, and has a record of forgiving the debts when they become unpayable. The US (via the IMF) lends money for infrastructure under terms that require concessions in government policy like "repealing wage laws" and "spending less on healthcare", and rarely discharges debt, instead lending out more money at worse interest with even more austerity concessions. If a government pops up thay doesn't like the terms, we coup them. China does nothing anything like that.
You’re overstating the case somewhat but there’s definitely merit to that point. I think it’s a trap though to assume there can only be one aggressor in the situation: China isn’t a global military power but it has been quite aggressive around its borders and the current actions against the Uighurs, Tibetans, etc. are on a scale reminiscent of 19th century American campaigns against the native inhabitants. If you live around the South China Sea you’re quite understandably going to be worried to an extent that someone in Africa is not.
Most of those "actions" are reported to us by our government, whose ability to report objective fact has not been demonstrated. To take Xinjiang, in particular: do a deep dive into the reporting and see where it comes from. You'll discover that it all boils down to a report by one guy, a fellow of the Victims of Communism org named Adrian Zenz. His report has been responded to in various places, and whether you take the responses at face value or not, they bring up good points worth investigation that call Zenz into very serious doubt.
That’s a serious citation needed on all points, starting with the claim that only the U.S. government is reporting that and we somehow collectively imagined all of the non-governmental and non-U.S. coverage. I note in particular that the “various places” phrasing makes it hard to know what you’re talking about or how you determined those sources are credible.
It's worth reading the response from a person in China. That's not to say you should believe it _more_, but that you should hear what the objections are and whether they make sense (and whether that critique calls into question anything else in the original report, which, by the way, you should also read http://english.scio.gov.cn/xinjiangfocus/2020-09/14/content_...).
That said, "non-governmental" and "non-U.S." coverage can be suprisingly illusory. Pay attention to the sources next time you see a Xinjiang story, whether in or out of the U.S., and report back if you find out that it ultimately sources someone other than Zenz (of course, make sure to do this recursively).
It's also worth pointing out that non-governmental organizations get their funding from somewhere, and, surprise, the places most critical of China tend to get their grants from sources that are ultimately government funds. The National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Asia are particularly infamous for distancing themselves from their government ties (Allen Weinstein, a founder of the former, famously said in a 1991 interview that "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.").
I wonder how easy it would actually be to shoot down. Are rockets actually designed to track something like this? And do they have planes that can fly that high and shoot something so slow.
Also, the negative effects of a failed attempt to shoot down could be worse than the threat of the balloon. Both in terms of embarrassment and spent ordinance getting dropped.
Military intelligence gathering is so common that countries basically agree to not start a shooting war for overflying each others country gathering military intelligence.
If every military intelligence balloon, satellite, aircraft, drone, etc, was considered an act of war and destroyed, the world as we know it would have ended a long, long, long time ago, and none of us would be here having this conversation.
Or how they know it's a surveillance balloon as opposed to some kind of weather balloon. I guess you could say a weather balloon is still conducting a kind of surveillance.
The U2 is an amazing piece of technology. The amount of times it's been gutted and retrofitted is crazy. 67 years and counting; sure don't make them like they use to. Even the global hawk can't match its capability 1:1.
> The U2 is an amazing piece of technology. The amount of times it's been gutted and retrofitted is crazy. 67 years and counting; sure don't make them like they use to. Even the global hawk can't match its capability 1:1.
If the U2 is amazing, which superlative is appropriate for the SR-71?
You are allowed to spy on other countries only as long as you are really good at it. Sending a random weather balloon to fly over another country definitely doesn't cut it.
You're going to actually have to explain what logic you think you're talking about here in order for that claim to stick. Because no, not even remotely.
Well spying is a crime in most countries so saying that it is not a crime until it's detected is just wrong. My point was that crimes are still crimes even if they are not detected.
Spying on a country, in that country, for another country, is absolutely a crime, not ambiguity there. And spying using satellites, many hundreds of miles above controlled airspace, is not a crime - it's not even considered spying. In between those two you get high altitude spying using surveillance aircraft or balloons. It really does fall in this weird "not a crime until detected" grey area.
The Chinese and Russians are free to shoot down an SR-71 or U2 over their airspace. Problem is that's much easier said than done.
Shooting down a balloon over US airspace, or better yet, grabbing it, should be a no-brainer. It's our airspace. Why is this being discussed? Get that thing on that ground, keep it, and study it.
- The official added the surveillance balloon “does not create significant” opportunities for China to gather intelligence beyond other methods such as low orbit satellites.
- The US has observed similar activity over the past several years, including during the administration of Donald Trump. Unlike previous years the balloon “is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time this time around”, the defence official said.
Generally, when something like this becomes news, someone is trying to shift the Overton window.
Who wants this to be news and to what end are they manipulating collective perception?
I am so cynical so I respond the opposite way. Good for China, I applaud them for keeping tabs on a nation that routinely use drones in foreign skies to murder civilians.
Are you saying you trust that China is keeping tabs on the US? In what way do you think they are and what is your mental model for deciding who to trust?
I am not OP, but I must express my belief that the world was a more harmonious and simpler place for the average person when the United States was not a dominant global power. The fear of communism, in fact, was probably one of the driving forces behind the creation of a thriving middle class in the US.
It is probably not a coincidence that since the fall of the Soviet Union, income and wealth disparities have only continued to escalate in the United States, painting a stark picture of the consequences of unchecked hegemonic power.
It's like all those "russians testing our airspace" propaganda a few years back. Everybody tests everyone's airspace. It's only when the elites want it to turn it into "news" that you hear about it. Then it's all forgotten.
It's just manufactured propaganda. The good thing about this is you can see how propaganda ( aka news/media ) coordinates with the pentagon/intelligence/etc.
This. Why do people suspect it's a spy balloon? No reasons are given in the article. Even if it did come from China, it could be nothing more than a mere scientific weather balloon. This smells like propaganda.
China has spy sattelites that can do what this balloon supposedly can, and that's why the US isn't shooting it down. What a load of crap. 1) the US would shoot it down anyway 2) why would China send a balloon when they have sattelites?
The conclusion drawn must be that it's either not Chinese, or not a spy balloon, or most probably not either.
> China has spy satellites that can do what this balloon supposedly can,
Satellites have predictable orbits and are otherwise tracked, but a stealthy balloon might go unnoticed and manage to surveil sites that don’t mask their sensitive activities when they think the sky is currently clear. It’s possible that the ballon is performing signals intelligence gathering, or something else satellites at altitude can’t do.
Also, the perception (true or otherwise) that the US is not fully able to control its national airspace is something China can make propaganda out of.
If you can make a B2 bomber stealthy then perhaps you can do the same with a balloon - the bags are thin polythene [1] and I assume you could combine geometry and radar absorbing material to make a payload disappear.
If it were that obviously visible why wasn’t it intercepted when it crossed into America’s air defence identification zone?
Those Chinese comrades have to be damn good engineers. They released spy balloon in China and magically fly over US. Just wow. Are they really controlling the weather?
According to Wikipedia, between 2000 and 5000 weather balloons are released daily. China's likely releasing hundreds of those. And there are reports of even regular helium balloons sometimes traveling thousands of miles.
It wouldn't be magical for one to accidentally end up basically anywhere.
>Why do people suspect it's a spy balloon? No reasons are given in the article. Even if it did come from China, it could be nothing more than a mere scientific weather balloon. This smells like propaganda.
Violating sovereign airspace matters to the US only when it's done to the US. Because to the US, the US is the only sovereign country in the world. All the others can and should get routinely violated by US planes, if you believe US media. So yeah, get out of here.
This is US news, in a U.S. newspaper, on a US site, in English.
I think sometimes people complain that something isn’t news it’s just US news, while they’re on US channels populated or run by US folks. And you know, what do you expect?
That's not their point. The US routinely violates various nation's airspace. Hell, what do you think the odds are the US is currently violating Chinese airspace in some capacity? Depending on who's definition of Chinese airspace you use, it's pretty damn likely.
How does the statement "The US violates routinely sovereign airspace" make the point that "China violating US airspace" is not newsworthy? If China routinely violated sovereign (US) airspace it wouldn't be newsworthy!
also note in the DOD press briefing they stated that this was markedly different than previous incursions due to primarily the duration of loitering.
also what are these comments..? openly lauding an adversarial state which is conducting flagrant surveillance operations in the continental united states? yikes.
Not everybody here on HN is from US. Not everybody automatically likes that US can do whatever they want, wherever they want and its fine because dubious reasons at best, but as soon as anybody else does same its outrage, terrorists and other blahs that look frankly laughable to most folks outside US. TBH its mostly the opposite, world is fed up with that for past 20 years since it brought just tons of evil, death and fucked up whole regions for generations to come. Even most democratic and US aligned countries are fed up with that. Don't forget more than 95% of mankind doesn't live in US.
This is definitely one of those situations. If US can fly spy planes over say Russia or China, why shouldn't they be allowed the same? If you shoot their stuff, they can shoot yours. Fair game I say (not dragging current russian war in ukraine into this, to which I am strong opponent and even donated my own drone to AFU when it started).
It's exhausting how literally every subject of public conversation is an op, isn't it? "The current thing", for any value of "current thing", just isn't worth devoting thought: whatever "the current thing" is, it's just bots and propaganda all the way down.
The fact that they don't(as far as I know) have weekly meetings where they decide which civilians to murder with drones doesn't mean that they don't murder civilians with drones.
OP said regularly murdering civilians (intentionally targeting to kill, after meetings on who to target). No one is saying it hasn’t ever happened, but are there weekly/monthly meetings now?
> a nation that routinely use drones in foreign skies to murder civilians
That? The US flies aircraft across the borders of all targeted nations daily and violates their airspace. But the Anglosaxon media always only talks about how others are doing it, deceiving people to think that only 'others' do such things. Textbook example of lying by omission explained by Chomsky.
A lot of people don't realize that a relatively simple balloon can be designed to take off from anywhere in the world, reach any other point in the world, and hover for multiple days sending back data with very little deviation. All the balloon needs is a way to change its altitude, that's it, it doesn't need any actuators to move in horizontal direction.
Google's project Loon (https://x.company/projects/loon/) did this and I thought it was pretty darn cool. The way it works is this: different layers of stratosphere have different wind directions. If you can accurately predict the wind directions in different layers, you can in theory move in horizontal direction just by changing your altitude. Loon had pretty good models and simulated the wind directions well. Their balloon used to take off from Nevada and reach Kenya (I believe) and hover there for multiple days to provide comms. They use a cool reinforcement learning based controller in their loop: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8
I remember some Chinese researchers writing papers on this topic back then and them saying they'd have good results if they had access to data from Loon: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976 I don't think Loon ever shared any data publicly (I was wrong, they did apparently open source a ton of data) but Loon did get shut down (like a lot of other Alphabet's moonshots) and I remember some of their tech and patents were sold to SoftBank and others. I was surprised US did not try to stop this in the interest of national security.
Probably not, but also my personal experience says that you can't really replicate things just always from the patent. There's always some secret sauce to get things to work. The question is what exactly did Loon sell when they shut down and where did most of the people working on it end up? I know some folks at Loon and they went back to either Google Brain or some other moonshots in Google or Google Research but a lot of people didn't do that.
Tell that to the pharmaceutical industry. Many pharmaceutical patents can't be reproduced without insider knowledge as discovered companies that entered the "generic" business.
Lawyers who worked in chemical and medical patents confirmed this for me when I was in Google Legal. Don't even get me started about software patents.
The legal fiction is that a "reasonable amount of experimentation" may be required, beyond what's in the patent. The notion is that a lab tech determines the exact concentrations, temps, and pressure to get the thing to work.
That was my point, he seemed to be suggesting something almost like espionage if the patents had been sold to someone in contact with China or something, but the patents are already public and I don't think would be respected for this application.
Many Chinese equipment does look like a copy of Western equipment. I don't think China respect patents at all. And I think even allied countries wouldn't respect patents with military applications if in their interest.
I know people who worked at Loon. It certainly wasn't shut down because of the lawsuit. It was pretty much because of X's move fast approach and they didn't think Loon would make money anytime soon. They killed another one of my favorite projects for same reasons: https://x.company/projects/makani/
From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of them to provide persistent packet-loss-free 24x7x365 coverage over a USA county sized area. Paying customers won't tolerate situations like "oh sorry the balloon has drifted away with the upper atmosphere winds, wait a few hours for maybe another one to be back in our region".
With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links.
With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.
Yeah it didn't make a lot of sense in most of continental United States and maybe that's why most of Loon's initial deployment testing was in Africa with sparser terrestrial network. Starlink definitely changed the rules and made LEO based systems a viable alternative for sure.
I had funding lined up for an experiment with Loon to deliver bandwidth to hospital ships, and now work with another guy who was at X during that time. Their perspectives are similar: the logistics to make this work with any reliability is truly heroic (I'm not asking for 5 9s, one 7 would be a good start). The experiments they did were incredible. But as a reliable asset ... good luck.
This is what makes the Albuquerque ballon festival kind of unique (they call it the box). Balloons take off fly away, change altitude and fly back to land in almost the same place.
well, you almost got it. you forgot the part where the fly past for a distance so that when they start to lower altitude, it brings them back to the start. what you describe doesn't really make a box
IIRC it’s related to the nearby mountains. Fly up, pushed towards mountains, go lower, pushed back towards the river/valley were launched. I feel for other people who didn’t get to grow up seeing those balloons every year on their way to school or random times.
Just to put numbers on it for example…Say they travel 1 mile down range where they then rise in altitude. Now, they float back 2 miles before lowering altitude to travel back 1 mile to where they started.
They fly past for a 1 mile distance in this example
The balloon controls its own movement using only itself (and GPS) as a data source, right? Like, it's not receiving radio instructions from the ground?
It's a shame that Richard DeVaul got caught up in a political moment and a pearl clutching media that was eager to misrepresent burning man in the most salacious way possible.
Richard co-founded loon and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met.
Awful what happened to him. Google's collective IQ dropped precipitously when he left.
1. The guy sexually propositioned a woman in an interview.
2. Seriously, do we need more? He's not stupid, he took the same management harassment training as everyone else in the company, he should have known better, he did know better, and he fessed up to it.
When you're a director, your reporting chain is not your personal Tinder. Please inform yourself on the subject of illegal sexual harassment in the United States, you'll save yourself and your reports and HR a lot of trouble.
Because I was told a very different story. There's a lot more to it than what you may have read.
Perhaps you should consider reserving judgement until you have all the facts.
Consider for a moment that there may be important details and nuance that's missed by newspapers that are most interested in clicks.
Please inform yourself that accusations are not evidence, and maybe consider what you would feel if you were being judged by accusations alone.
I'm not at liberty to discuss the details, but I highly recommend you slow your rush to judgement. There's a lot about the whole situation that you are not aware of.
The offending interaction occurred after the interview at burning man. He did not sexually proposition anyone in the interview. Furthermore the allegations were made two years after the supposed incidents occurred, the more distant an event is in our memory the more I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the possibility of people's accounts drifting from the truth.
The issue is whether Simpson was denied before or after burning man. If it was before, which is apparently what Devaul was insisting, it really was inappropriate to take any action in my opinion. If you match on tinder with someone you once interviewed, after the hire/no hurry decision is made, then your company shouldn't be treating this relationship any different from a total stranger. Or are we supposed to keep spreadsheets of every person we ever interviewed? Because that's not in my sexual harassment training, I dunno about yours.
Think about how you would defend yourself if someone accused you of making a sexual advance in an interview after you rejected them for a job? If testimony alone is enough to get you fired, then that's a significant source of pressure to give female candidates positive outcomes even if their performance isn't up to par.
This aligns with how the situation was described to me, with the exception that he was actually trying to help her get a job at Google, but she was turned down by the hiring manager (not Richard) and was unhappy about it.
It was terrible timing given the other stuff that was going on with Google at the time, and he sort of got swept up in all that.
I do agree with Richard's statement that he had a lapse in judgement.
I think it's critically important to keep personal and professional life strictly separate, especially as an executive.
You've been given more information multiple times on this thread.
There's another side to the story that's very different than your belligerent assertions.
Are you interested in learning, or just cursing and throwing unsupported accusations?
And no, he didn't "fess up to it" as you've said elsewhere. He admitted to an error in judgement, without going into details.
I don't know specifically what he meant by that, but it's possible that he meant his error in judgement was trying to help the wrong person, in the wrong context.
No, I've met Richard and was impressed by him. I don't know him well, and haven't talked to him in years.
I did briefly discuss the whole situation with him after it happened, and came to understand that there was a lot more to the story than what was reported.
The problem with Loon was that there weren't enough of them, and weather patterns would inevitably cause a clumping of them in certain areas of the world where they would be useless. Tethered balloons at 100k' / 30km would be more useful for comms.
There's no tether material nearly strong enough to withstand the forces from wind and the tether's own weight and drag at 30km altitude - plus 15km additional length for lateral drift.
There's a concept in engineering called "Reißlänge" (≈ breaking length), which is how long a cable of a certain material can be before it would rip due to its own weight if suspended by one end [0].
The values for some materials are actually much higher than I remembered, with Kevlar reaching ~250 km. From a purely hold-its-own-weight perspective it seems like it might actually be possible!
Obviously there's a ton of other problems that wouldn't make it feasible, the first I can think of is the weight of a 50 km tether wouldn't allow the balloon to even take off. I'm sure you can think of another million reasons it wouldn't work.
That's interesting and surprisingly long for Kevlar.
The highest altitude recorded by a single kite is less than 5km. I understand the biggest constraint for higher flights is tether strength-to-weight ratio. Nylon is typically used - fishing line.
Tether diameter is another factor as the load from wind, on the tether alone, is considerable over such lengths.
It's a materials manufacturing to applications and lifecycle problem, not a technical one.
Graphene does 50 GPa in bulk. A single atom sheet of it does 10 MPa on its own.
Take 75 metric tonnes of cable / space elevator ribbon.
That expressed as tensile pressure at an attachment point(s) is conservatively 7.5 GPa over an area about 10 cm^2. With sensible engineering, the entire craft (a very large one) would possess a web of attachment points across its perimeter to distribute forces more-or-less evenly.
I think I saw in a museum once that that's how Japan sent over bombs during second world war. They were able to calculate that even back then. It's crazy impressive.
446 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 439 ms ] threadBut a lot load balancers now fingerprint VPN addresses so that doesn’t work either
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/
(also for Firefox, which is the one I'm using)
This is what I do when stupid, horny websites just refresh the current, stupid website rather than actually going back to where I was.
(Tip: Keep clicking the next link / view the archive history to get to the latest snapshot)
(edit to add: i.e. field test planned comms and sensors platforms for use in future conflict scenarios)
Tracking: satellites are incredibly easy to track once you know their orbital parameters. A balloon, far less so. You need a lot of active tracking.
Altitude: a balloon is much closer to the ground than a satellite. That allows a much smaller camera to take the same picture. It also could give you access to radio signals that might not be as easily monitored from space.
Harder to spot: being closer to the ground, it will be beyond the horizon until it's much closer.
And of course it's far, far cheaper. The Chinese space program is doing well, but it's still very expensive to build and launch satellites.
There are of course numerous downsides.
Measure Response: Determine what an adversary nation does in response to the violation (what resources are scrambled, where do they come from etc)
Messaging: All the permutations of two sets of government folks trying to send a message the pair mutually understand re: defense etc
Tie up resources: Low cost provocation may divert higher cost resources and tie them up for a longer period of time since its a dwelling threat
Acquire signal information: Use sensors and measurement systems outside of the threat to measure the locations and signatures of tracking systems deployed to assess and monitor the threat
Deploy lightweight physical payloads: dust something of interest over an area etc
The technology is pretty mature, Google ran a whole fleet of them with Project Loon back in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC
(Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)
Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature.
Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.
"four Soviet MiGs" (from the linked headline)
> back in the 40's
"On a cold November day in 1952" (linked article, paragraph 2)
> a guy
"Royce Williams" (linked article, literally the first two words), Navy Cross recipient and former US Navy pilot, not 'some guy'.
What kind of hasty carelessness causes you to share a link to a story, embellish it with details, but just screw up on key facts? Including, I might add, the rather significant difference in implication between a US pilot shooting down MiGs in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was either an ally or a peacetime enemy, vs. the 1950s, when the Korean War happened.
That was 1946 and the start of the cold war
The answer is "I just woke up."
The GP is saying the same thing as you.
I had a mortgage during the 17-27% interest years of the eighties. I think about that when people kibbitz about inflation these days.
And just referring to a person who is named and credentialed in the article as 'a guy' just seems like throwing a layer of extra carelessness on top.
I just can't fathom how someone accomplishes this.
If there's one thing I try to encourage people to do in online discourse in general, it's to recognize that you don't have to guess. You have time to go look up the facts. Things are knowable, you don't have to vaguely gesture in the direction of the truth.
And in this case the op had the source right there! They must have googled up the link and opened the page and copied the URL! The facts were right there, in the next tab!
Person wakes up and browses interesting stories, remembers semi-relevant story, decides to comment about the similarity and forgets specifics. Realizes right before posting "oh shit I have to cite my sources or else pedants will ratio me into being unable to participate in other conversations" and quickly searches for a recent link that mostly backs up their commentary. Does not think to fact check every detail. Backfires.
The numbers matter too. Shooting down MIGs happened all the time. Dogfighting seven solo and shooting down four is a huge thing.
According to a Pentagon source, the balloon offers "limited additive value" over satellites.
More interesting excerpts:
>The incident, which occurred in the last two days, marked the latest aggressive Chinese intelligence gathering maneuvers in recent years. U.S. defense officials said the balloon loitered over the U.S. longer than in previous similar incidents, which made this “different.”
<snip>
> Mr. Biden was presented with options and proposed that the high-altitude balloon be shot down after it was spotted and reported by civilians in a commercial airliner, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon feared civilian casualties, and opted not to shoot down the balloon, U.S. officials said.
<snip>
> The balloon “was traveling at an altitude well above the commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground,” Gen. Ryder added.
<snip>
> The balloon was observed flying over Montana after flying over Canada and the Aleutian Islands, one U.S. official said. It was large enough for its debris to cause damage, and while the U.S. considered shooting it down over a sparsely populated area of Montana, the U.S. opted to not shoot it down. It also flew over sensitive sites, a senior defense official told reporters Thursday.
Uh... no?
Mainly because satellites are known -- black sites like Area 51 reguarly put away the "good stuff" when they known a spy satellite is overhead. That's not possible for random Chinese balloons we only find out about when some commercial pilot phones them in.
Why wouldn't we prioritize simply acquiring the thing for analysis of what sort of optics and other capabilities they're floating through our air-space?
Who cares what "limited additive value" we presume it to have over satellites.
It's a huge psyops value, and a huge opportunity to demonstrate we can trivially acquire and reverse such items if they'd like to send us more of their state of the art surveillance gadgets to take apart.
By not doing so we imply that's not something we're capable of. Not a good look at all.
I don’t think it’s trivial though. The slow speed makes use of aircraft tricky. The thing may have countermeasures, like a self-destruct mechanism for if it detects anything approaching it. Perhaps not an explosive self-destruct (flying explosives over a foreign country would be brazen indeed), but perhaps something electronic that scuttles the interesting equipment. And finally, perhaps the response to its presence is precisely what its owners have sent it to observe. An up-close streaming webcam view of a US Air Force operation surely has some value.
Because there's a good chance America's three letter agencies have that figured out already anyway and the thing is technically ten years out of date.
Conducting some potentially risky and costly shootdown of a balloon over US territory seems out of proportion.
Scrambling F-22s to intercept something harmless we understand so deeply makes no sense.
> Conducting some potentially risky and costly shootdown of a balloon over US territory seems out of proportion.
I didn't say anything about shooting it down. But if that's the US's only option, it speaks volumes to how incapable we are of handling such a threat without undue risk to ourselves. Embarrassing if so.
One hypothesis: because we got high-resolution photographs of it, identified it, and we already have comprehensive intelligence and possibly one or more captured examples of the model, so we don’t expect there to be any particular intelligence value of getting another one.
> By not doing so we imply that’s not something we’re capable of.
Or not something we need to do.
Similar balloons appear to have been photographed in Hawaii, India (Andamans), Japan. A different type was recently photographed over the Philippines and there is a comment about use over Guam.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-spy-balloon-ove... https://twitter.com/steffanwatkins/status/162136299808111001...
The balloon isn't on there, and the (presumed) fighter jets that are escorting it aren't either but you can see the fuel tankers.
How crazy...the future we live in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owyhee
The annual rendevous was held in Idaho. There are quite a few French named things around the area. Lake Pend Orielle, etc.
Also, lots of stuff named after Lewis and Clark, the Jesuit priests and the Mullan trail.
are they being looked into?
The FAA closes off the airspace around the desert which allows the really powerful rockets to fly.
[1] http://www.tripolimn.org/events/balls/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h3HAv9ra9Q
It's where all the private individual owners of the biggest military equipment you can buy in the US go to shoot their equipment that would be basically illegal to shoot anywhere else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R02emks3BoQ
I like this one where they shoot a ball turret from a bomber from a different year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_TaK0WZj2k
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/project-mesos-a-two-st...
There are ducted fan model airplanes which are absolutely nothing like cruise missiles because they aren't GPS guided.
When they asked an expert about the aiming issue, the response was basically laughter and "I'm not going to solve the precision guided munitions problem for you because of legal reasons, and you're not going to be able to figure it out."
I expect precision guided rocketry is going to be a lot harder than a chunk of steel barely high enough to reach terminal velocity.
Hobbiests are already making self landing (spacex-style) model rockets. That is a much harder problem.
AFAIK, in the US, precision guidance to a specific orientation on a amateur rocket is legal (i.e. active stabilization), but precision guidance to a specific location on a amateur rocket is indeed illegal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYVZh5kqaFg&t=660s
Think the name was Baumgartner or something like it.
edit, however, lasing a camera sensor doesn't need a lot of holding time. so just keep bouncing it around and hopefully, eventually you'll cover enough to render useless.
https://www.ilda.com/camera-sensor-damage.htm
Normal private property like someone's quadcopter, I would assume the owner still has rights to it (and possibly liability depending on how/where it fell). But foreign government property that's not supposed to be there in the first place?
Judges aren’t obligated to believe your bullshit.
There is also a risk of somehow triggering an unanticipated outcome due to e.g. unknown materials or chemicals on board.
Maybe they are doing signals intelligence on it.
Maybe it's a (fake) Chinese school project, and the world wide media will be like tomorrow "US gov shoots down Chinese little girl science project".
"Cool balloon Mei, want to bring it to the White House?"
>Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.
https://twitter.com/POTUS44/status/644193755814342656
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/16/440890750...
1. There's a high risk of debris falling on people on the ground.
2. Any sensitive information collected would have been sent home already, so shooting it now isn't going to do much good.
So Pentagon leadership recommended not taking "kinetic action". What's interesting is that they have been tracking it for several days over the US mainland. You'd think the strongest military in the world could do something other than...just watch.
Which is not at all what is occurring. Having flight tracks of multiple refueling tankers demonstrates far more resources have already been expended on this "not a concern to us" than was spent on deploying it...
That excuse seems really odd to me. Montana is the third-least densely populated state with 6.86 people per square mile of land.
https://www.malmstrom.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Ar...
They could probably shoot it down without making much debris. And even if it made debris, at most it would hit a cow. The reality is it's not collecting anything of value.
These have taken place numerous times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/341st_Missile_Wing_LGM-30_Minu...
It's like a fly sitting on the windshield of your car parked in the driveway or something. It's there, it might be annoying if you think about it, but it isn't actually doing any meaningful harm.
Maybe they are planning to drop an insignificant number of small munitions on random locations in the US or something.
if there was any risk, it would be shot down. it it wasn't, it was probably observing wilderness/pastures
i say we launch a balloon that parks itself below theirs blocking the view. no capabilities given up then
The point is to use them on a real danger. Accurate or not, the Pentagon clearly doesn’t see this ballon as a threat in any capacity. Why would they do anything other than keep an eye on it?
Some bean counters decided this was low threat. And, more likely, China told us it was coming, and probably to just count silos like we’ve been doing back and forth since the 70s
If it was spooky, it wouldn’t be bright white…
Pretty sure they've got satellites that can do that.
There’s an argument to be made that the strongest military in the world showing restraint and just watching is probably a good thing.
This was unacceptable to the West, so we covertly overthrew their democracy and installed an unpopular autocratic monarch in 1953. This Monarch would then rule for the next 26 years until in 1979 they would have their own "real" revolution. It was largely led by Islamic extremists, and they replaced our puppet monarchy with an Islamic theocracy. And this theocracy not only has a pretty negative view of the West, but for some reason always thinks we're trying to engage in covert actions to try to overthrow them! Go figure.
1953 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
1979 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
I’m not even suggesting this was good foreign policy, just that none of the above history proves the thesis that we set them back a few hundred years.
You are are aware of the difference between the 1820s and 1920s I hope.
Iran wasn't touched, you may mean Iraq.
In Western Montana? Rather doubtful. Just wait 5 minutes until it is over national forest land, which is the vast majority of the area, and then shoot it down.
https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/radiosondes
Tons more in amateur radio etc., see APRS
That said, "non-governmental" and "non-U.S." coverage can be suprisingly illusory. Pay attention to the sources next time you see a Xinjiang story, whether in or out of the U.S., and report back if you find out that it ultimately sources someone other than Zenz (of course, make sure to do this recursively).
It's also worth pointing out that non-governmental organizations get their funding from somewhere, and, surprise, the places most critical of China tend to get their grants from sources that are ultimately government funds. The National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Asia are particularly infamous for distancing themselves from their government ties (Allen Weinstein, a founder of the former, famously said in a 1991 interview that "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.").
B) China has probably cut a deal to “count nuke sites” which is informally allowed in request during times of high nuclear tension
C) They most likely told us before hand it was going over
D) this is almost positively a big ol nothing burger, and some back channel deal with China to get them not to support Russia
Also, the negative effects of a failed attempt to shoot down could be worse than the threat of the balloon. Both in terms of embarrassment and spent ordinance getting dropped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies
Military intelligence gathering is so common that countries basically agree to not start a shooting war for overflying each others country gathering military intelligence.
If every military intelligence balloon, satellite, aircraft, drone, etc, was considered an act of war and destroyed, the world as we know it would have ended a long, long, long time ago, and none of us would be here having this conversation.
edit: wow, lots of folks apparently unfamiliar with the 1960's U-2 incident eh? Time to brush up on military aviation history.
If the U2 is amazing, which superlative is appropriate for the SR-71?
But unfortunately not cost effective.
The real crime isn't spying but getting caught.
Shooting down a balloon over US airspace, or better yet, grabbing it, should be a no-brainer. It's our airspace. Why is this being discussed? Get that thing on that ground, keep it, and study it.
- The official added the surveillance balloon “does not create significant” opportunities for China to gather intelligence beyond other methods such as low orbit satellites.
- The US has observed similar activity over the past several years, including during the administration of Donald Trump. Unlike previous years the balloon “is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time this time around”, the defence official said.
Japanese balloon bombs from WWII
Who wants this to be news and to what end are they manipulating collective perception?
I am so cynical so I respond the opposite way. Good for China, I applaud them for keeping tabs on a nation that routinely use drones in foreign skies to murder civilians.
Normally, if you are feeling nice and secure, it is because someone has manipulated you to a place of vulnerability so they can take advantage of you.
This story wants me to feel like the US government is prudent, competent and observant. So, naturally, I am scared shitless.
It is probably not a coincidence that since the fall of the Soviet Union, income and wealth disparities have only continued to escalate in the United States, painting a stark picture of the consequences of unchecked hegemonic power.
It's just manufactured propaganda. The good thing about this is you can see how propaganda ( aka news/media ) coordinates with the pentagon/intelligence/etc.
China has spy sattelites that can do what this balloon supposedly can, and that's why the US isn't shooting it down. What a load of crap. 1) the US would shoot it down anyway 2) why would China send a balloon when they have sattelites?
The conclusion drawn must be that it's either not Chinese, or not a spy balloon, or most probably not either.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/05/u-s-militarys-newes...
Satellites have predictable orbits and are otherwise tracked, but a stealthy balloon might go unnoticed and manage to surveil sites that don’t mask their sensitive activities when they think the sky is currently clear. It’s possible that the ballon is performing signals intelligence gathering, or something else satellites at altitude can’t do.
Also, the perception (true or otherwise) that the US is not fully able to control its national airspace is something China can make propaganda out of.
There's simply no way one could ever be hidden from radar. So 'stealthy balloons' do not exist.
If you can make a B2 bomber stealthy then perhaps you can do the same with a balloon - the bags are thin polythene [1] and I assume you could combine geometry and radar absorbing material to make a payload disappear.
If it were that obviously visible why wasn’t it intercepted when it crossed into America’s air defence identification zone?
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/scientific-balloons/types-of-balloons
https://archive.ph/DJgKa
It wouldn't be magical for one to accidentally end up basically anywhere.
>Why do people suspect it's a spy balloon? No reasons are given in the article. Even if it did come from China, it could be nothing more than a mere scientific weather balloon. This smells like propaganda.
I think sometimes people complain that something isn’t news it’s just US news, while they’re on US channels populated or run by US folks. And you know, what do you expect?
So it always matters, but it's frequency determines whether it's newsworthy? I don't understand that position.
> “Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years,” Ryder said
Seems more like someone wanted to stir up some feelings.
also note in the DOD press briefing they stated that this was markedly different than previous incursions due to primarily the duration of loitering.
also what are these comments..? openly lauding an adversarial state which is conducting flagrant surveillance operations in the continental united states? yikes.
This is definitely one of those situations. If US can fly spy planes over say Russia or China, why shouldn't they be allowed the same? If you shoot their stuff, they can shoot yours. Fair game I say (not dragging current russian war in ukraine into this, to which I am strong opponent and even donated my own drone to AFU when it started).
And adversarial to whom? The west is as adversarial to China as China is to the west.
You sound put off that the comments don't have enough patriotism. Lacking blind patriotism would in fact be called "neutral".
> common != it has happened before
It would be atypical to say "over the past several years" about a unique occurrence.
Exactly. There is there is no true self under all the masks.
Why would you shift the overton window?
That? The US flies aircraft across the borders of all targeted nations daily and violates their airspace. But the Anglosaxon media always only talks about how others are doing it, deceiving people to think that only 'others' do such things. Textbook example of lying by omission explained by Chomsky.
Typical hypocrisy.
Google's project Loon (https://x.company/projects/loon/) did this and I thought it was pretty darn cool. The way it works is this: different layers of stratosphere have different wind directions. If you can accurately predict the wind directions in different layers, you can in theory move in horizontal direction just by changing your altitude. Loon had pretty good models and simulated the wind directions well. Their balloon used to take off from Nevada and reach Kenya (I believe) and hover there for multiple days to provide comms. They use a cool reinforcement learning based controller in their loop: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8
I remember some Chinese researchers writing papers on this topic back then and them saying they'd have good results if they had access to data from Loon: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976 I don't think Loon ever shared any data publicly (I was wrong, they did apparently open source a ton of data) but Loon did get shut down (like a lot of other Alphabet's moonshots) and I remember some of their tech and patents were sold to SoftBank and others. I was surprised US did not try to stop this in the interest of national security.
https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility...
What you're talking about is called a 112 rejection. Section 112 has to do with "written description," "enablement," and "best mode."
Getting a patent invalidated after it's issued can't be done on 112 grounds. It's done based on anticipation and obviousness (prior art, basically).
The legal fiction is that a "reasonable amount of experimentation" may be required, beyond what's in the patent. The notion is that a lab tech determines the exact concentrations, temps, and pressure to get the thing to work.
Of course this is abused.
He could have argued they maybe should have originally been covered by https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act to begin with maybe.
That's why important stuff is kept secret.
e.g. "How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power" https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/
Loon was shut down because Google stole the tech.
"In February of 2008, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page visited Space Data’s headquarters with as many as 10 other Google executives in tow" https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links.
With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Ball...
https://www.krqe.com/news/balloon-fiesta/local-pilot-explain...
Except the day I went, which is something.. Still quite the sight.
NM also has the “original burning man” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra.
They fly past for a 1 mile distance in this example
It's a shame that Richard DeVaul got caught up in a political moment and a pearl clutching media that was eager to misrepresent burning man in the most salacious way possible.
Richard co-founded loon and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met.
Awful what happened to him. Google's collective IQ dropped precipitously when he left.
2. Seriously, do we need more? He's not stupid, he took the same management harassment training as everyone else in the company, he should have known better, he did know better, and he fessed up to it.
When you're a director, your reporting chain is not your personal Tinder. Please inform yourself on the subject of illegal sexual harassment in the United States, you'll save yourself and your reports and HR a lot of trouble.
Because I was told a very different story. There's a lot more to it than what you may have read.
Perhaps you should consider reserving judgement until you have all the facts.
Consider for a moment that there may be important details and nuance that's missed by newspapers that are most interested in clicks.
Please inform yourself that accusations are not evidence, and maybe consider what you would feel if you were being judged by accusations alone.
I'm not at liberty to discuss the details, but I highly recommend you slow your rush to judgement. There's a lot about the whole situation that you are not aware of.
The issue is whether Simpson was denied before or after burning man. If it was before, which is apparently what Devaul was insisting, it really was inappropriate to take any action in my opinion. If you match on tinder with someone you once interviewed, after the hire/no hurry decision is made, then your company shouldn't be treating this relationship any different from a total stranger. Or are we supposed to keep spreadsheets of every person we ever interviewed? Because that's not in my sexual harassment training, I dunno about yours.
Think about how you would defend yourself if someone accused you of making a sexual advance in an interview after you rejected them for a job? If testimony alone is enough to get you fired, then that's a significant source of pressure to give female candidates positive outcomes even if their performance isn't up to par.
It was terrible timing given the other stuff that was going on with Google at the time, and he sort of got swept up in all that.
I do agree with Richard's statement that he had a lapse in judgement.
I think it's critically important to keep personal and professional life strictly separate, especially as an executive.
It's a fucking interview, not a date. Unless you are hiring an escort, it is not the place to discuss your sex life.
There's another side to the story that's very different than your belligerent assertions.
Are you interested in learning, or just cursing and throwing unsupported accusations?
And no, he didn't "fess up to it" as you've said elsewhere. He admitted to an error in judgement, without going into details.
I don't know specifically what he meant by that, but it's possible that he meant his error in judgement was trying to help the wrong person, in the wrong context.
Yes! Evidence.
I did briefly discuss the whole situation with him after it happened, and came to understand that there was a lot more to the story than what was reported.
I do think he made an error in judgement.
I also believe he's utterly brilliant.
Both of those things can be true.
The values for some materials are actually much higher than I remembered, with Kevlar reaching ~250 km. From a purely hold-its-own-weight perspective it seems like it might actually be possible!
Obviously there's a ton of other problems that wouldn't make it feasible, the first I can think of is the weight of a 50 km tether wouldn't allow the balloon to even take off. I'm sure you can think of another million reasons it wouldn't work.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei%C3%9Fl%C3%A4nge
The highest altitude recorded by a single kite is less than 5km. I understand the biggest constraint for higher flights is tether strength-to-weight ratio. Nylon is typically used - fishing line.
Tether diameter is another factor as the load from wind, on the tether alone, is considerable over such lengths.
Graphene does 50 GPa in bulk. A single atom sheet of it does 10 MPa on its own.
Take 75 metric tonnes of cable / space elevator ribbon.
That expressed as tensile pressure at an attachment point(s) is conservatively 7.5 GPa over an area about 10 cm^2. With sensible engineering, the entire craft (a very large one) would possess a web of attachment points across its perimeter to distribute forces more-or-less evenly.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Wapo https://archive.ph/cJ5KC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies