r/worldnews • u/DoremusJessup • Feb 05 '23
Balloons similar to the one that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina this weekend flew over the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration, according to a senior U.S. defense official
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3844511-chinese-balloons-flew-over-us-three-times-during-trump-administration-officials/1.8k
u/autotldr BOT Feb 05 '23
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 71%. (I'm a bot)
Balloons similar to the one that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina this weekend flew over the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration, according to a senior U.S. defense official.
As Republicans spent the past few days criticizing the Biden administration over its response to the suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew across the country, an official revealed during a briefing on Saturday that the U.S. was aware of three other instances during the prior administration and one instance earlier in the Biden administration that such an apparatus "Transited" the country.
Trump denied the revelation by defense officials that Chinese balloons flew over the U.S. during his administration, calling it "Disinformation."
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: balloon#1 administration#2 official#3 over#4 Chinese#5
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u/iamthedayman21 Feb 06 '23
After denouncing it, Trump provided a map of the US with a giant, black marker circle around the entire US. Stating he had everywhere a balloon didn’t travel over while he was President circled.
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u/invisible___hand Feb 06 '23 •
State officials in Alaska and Hawaii have responded to the inaccuracies in the map (which only had continental US circled) by assuring citizens that they were still a part of the US.
When asked about the discrepancy, Trump, refusing to admit error, thought for a bit and decreed that Alaska had been sold to Putin and Hawaii was a gift to his great friends in North Korea.
Finally Trump unveiled an major infrastructure initiative to “build a wall” to prevent Chinese balloons funded entirely by donations from the poor. Uneducated Americans from all walks of life lined up to donate to the “Build another wall” fund where 5% of donations were guaranteed to go towards wall building (after administrative fees and maintenance on the walls of Trumps real estate holdings). Several Trump family members were immediately appointed to well compensated board positions.
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u/iamthedayman21 Feb 06 '23
When asked by reporters why Puerto Rico was not included, Trump responded, “why would I include those damn, dirty immigrants? They aren’t sending us their best.” Despite state officials efforts to explain to the President that Puerto Ricans are US citizens, Trump refused to concede.
A later copy of the map was shown to have an extension of the circle added around Puerto Rico. When pressed by reporters as to the nature of the addition, the President stated he knew nothing about it, and in fact, had never even seen the map before. Despite the fact that the extension had “DJT” scribbled next to it.
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u/eskieski Feb 05 '23
“i don’t know why, Russia, would do it, He said, he didn’t do it”… remember…. trump, doesn’t know a truth
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u/Relendis Feb 05 '23
To Trump that fundamentally was the truth.
Present a narcissit with two options: 1, they didn't do it or 2, they did it because they knew they were playing you like a fiddle. The narcissist will go to extreme lengths in their own mind to hold true to the first because they are temperamentally unable to accept the second.
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u/legsintheair Feb 06 '23
It is easier to fool a person, than to convince them they have been fooled.
It’s why Chumps STILL vote for Trump.
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u/account_depleted Feb 06 '23
Trump, China & Russia's best friend.
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u/TreeChangeMe Feb 06 '23
China to MAGA - we'll help you fight the Liberals.
MAGA.... You gotchyurself a deal.
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u/lew_rong Feb 06 '23
China to Republicans: What if I told you that you could terrorize your friends and enemies with impunity and only be held accountable after you're long dead?
Republicans: Please, I can only get so erect!
China: Let me tell you about a little something called the Cultural Revolution...
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u/CaptainSluggo Feb 06 '23
Except Trump was hard on China, just about the only thing he did right.
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u/Duelgundam Feb 06 '23
Although, wasn't it said that T**** basically never reads the daily security briefing packets, and effectively just spend most of the day watching Fox?
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u/SemperScrotus Feb 06 '23
Trump denied the revelation by defense officials that Chinese balloons flew over the U.S. during his administration, calling it "Disinformation."
Trump using the word "disinformation" is the most unbelievable part of this whole story.
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u/Elmsfeuer Feb 06 '23
Not only disinformation, but FAKE DISINFORMATION
China had too much respect for “TRUMP” for this to have happened, and it NEVER did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!
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u/shelwheels Feb 06 '23
I was gonna say that's a new word for him, and such a big one! And according to the quote, he even spelled it correctly!? It's gotta be fake news.
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u/green_flash Feb 05 '23
It's not only Trump who refuted this claim. It's also been refuted by the following Trump administration officials:
- Former White House national security adviser John Bolton
- Former White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien
- Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell
- Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe
- Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Heino Klinck
- Former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller
- Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper
It has to be stated that most of them do not say outright that it's false. They say they "do not recall". They could of course all be lying or it could really have slipped from their memory. Maybe it was just a sidenote in some report from some intelligence agency.
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u/Chadlerk Feb 05 '23
I do not recall or "I don't want to admit to this but will leave the backdoor open in case further evidence proves me wrong"
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u/CelticGaelic Feb 06 '23
"Hey, don't worry about it. An all expenses paid resort trip will probably jog your memory. Congratulations, you're going water boarding at Guantonomo Bay!"
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u/JewingIt Feb 06 '23
Lol at thinking politicians are reprimanded for their lies and illegal actions..
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u/schmidtzkrieg Feb 06 '23
Waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay sounds awesome if you don't know what either of those things are.
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u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel Feb 06 '23
Mate, "I do not recall" is legalese for 'i can't lie but I can't tell the truth without incriminating myself'
If 5 government officials say 'they can't recall' to the same question, they absolutely fucking recall.
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u/Difficult_Bit_1339 Feb 06 '23
100%
Your memory can fade (and then you can later 'remember' if it is advantageous) with no legal repercussions.
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u/Obversa Feb 06 '23
Didn't a bunch of those on the list also invoke the Fifth Amendment elsewhere? I know for certain that "pleading the Fifth" is something that Donald Trump does quite a lot.
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u/I_Dont_Work_Here_Lad Feb 06 '23
Well yeah. Pretty fucking hard to forget a possible surveillance balloon flying through. Even harder when it happened more than once. As usual, politicians are lying.
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u/CWinter85 Feb 06 '23
I do not recall is a phrasing loophole to avoid a perjury charge.
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u/ProdesseQuamConspici Feb 06 '23
It has to be stated that most of them do not say outright that it's false. They say they "do not recall".
Then those aren't refutations and should be removed from the list.
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u/me_and_myself_and_i Feb 05 '23
DoD didn't bother informing them because they didn't think the balloons were important at that time. This time, the balloon hung around much longer.
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u/EcstaticMaybe01 Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
More like it didn't make national news so a proformative response wasn't nessasry.
Edit: The hivemind has informed me it's performative and not proformative. I bow to their certitude.
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u/Jeptic Feb 06 '23
That administration had so many batshit news stories going on that a Chinese spy balloon floating in the breeze might have been low on the ratings bandwagon.
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u/Nice-Violinist-6395 Feb 06 '23
look at this guy, bring facts to reddit like he’s bringing a fire extinguisher to an indoor fireworks party.
it’s useful, but will be entirely ignored
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u/CanadianJudo Feb 06 '23
You mean all the people such an event and coverup would make look bad at their jobs.
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u/TJNel Feb 06 '23
Lol I don't recall is yes it happened but I don't want to look like a liar when it comes out that I actually did know.
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u/fourthfloorgreg Feb 05 '23
If Trump and Bolton both deny it it's definitely true.
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u/FerricNitrate Feb 05 '23
Yeah there's a good number of names in that list that would piss on you and claim that the rain had just turned yellow.
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u/itsmesungod Feb 06 '23
“I do not recall” is the most common phrase in these lying clowns playbook. It leaves room for plausible deniability, some Trump and the GOP have dangerously perfected.
They know about it, please believe. They just don’t want to admit it outright and show their blatant hypocrisy. So by saying “I don’t recall” is a way they can tell a white lie and not directly lie, while still pandering to their party’s base.
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u/xXx420BlazeRodSaboxX Feb 05 '23
Notice how most of those names are the people most full of shit in that conmans administration
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u/Bluest_waters Feb 06 '23
Right? A bunch of Trump toadies "refuted" the claim
well? so fucking what?
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u/writingaltz Feb 06 '23
Hysterical how that’s also a direct list of people who are being investigated in connection to several of Trump’s alleged crimes.
Almost like they’re… idk… cohorts?
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u/FeckThul Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
I didn't realize that this needed to be said, but the comments so far suggest it is: the president has broad powers to control which information about national security matters are made public and which are retained. This assumption that "the media" or "the Democrats" would have outed this seems profoundly ignorant.
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u/Joshru Feb 05 '23
If there are clouds, then people will not see the balloon. And it is too high for normal aircraft to risk running into it.
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u/FeckThul Feb 05 '23
Plus even if people did see it, what exactly would they see, and what would they make of it? UFO? Assume it's a weather balloon?
The only reason we know what it is comes down to a disclosure by the American government, so if the Trump administration didn't do that... even if people saw something, they wouldn't know what.
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u/Zoollio Feb 05 '23
I promise you, me and many many other would see it and think, “Huh, balloon.” And move on with our lives. Even if I did go on to mention it to a friend (extremely unlikely) they’d go, “Huh.”
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u/Weak_Ring6846 Feb 05 '23
The company that made the balloons for the Google Loon program, Raven Aerostar, regularly launches these exact type of stratospheric balloons out of Sioux Falls, SD. Sometimes for the US military.
It’s pretty rare for these to be spotted at all, and when they are they’re usually told it’s fine, just a stratospheric research balloon. And then it’s a non-story. Obviously this time it was a bit of a bigger story.
But they’re rarely spotted is the point. All the people acting like it’s the most obvious shit in the world are, unsurprisingly, just some know-it-all redditors.
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u/SmokedBeef Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
NORAD can reportedly track these easily and at long range and would be able to tell which ballon’s are which and track them long term. The long flight time, flight path and foreign origin during this heightened period of military tension means the military saw this coming for a while, which means this public disclosure is as much about making a point to the Chinese and calling them out publicly before downing their ballon very publicly, as it is about informing the American public (in a “gentle” way) that our relationship with China and the tension between our governments has entered a new phase of potential hostility.
Edit given the new disclosure that several of these ballon incursions of US air space occurred during the trump administration and were allowed/able to complete their missions “unmolested” or intercepted, which further support the idea that this was essentially a public and final warning that this action will not be tolerated by both the White House and the pentagon. Currently it appears as though the US was either completely oblivious to these ballon incursions or the trump administration was never made aware of china’s breach of US airspace.
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u/-banned- Feb 06 '23
I tried telling people this along with factual information regarding these balloons (I worked on them for 3 years) and I was downvoted. People want to believe what they want to believe, they want the drama
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u/Ctownkyle23 Feb 06 '23
Yeah unless it had the Chinese flag on it or something I don't think anyone would care.
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u/juanjing Feb 06 '23
This assumption that "the media" or "the Democrats" would have outed this seems profoundly ignorant.
They don't care. They stay ignorant on purpose.
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u/creativename87639 Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
I’m pretty sure the only reason we knew about this one is because people saw it.
Edit: ima stop replying to ppl in this thread and just put a general comment here. Stop acting like if you saw a giant ass balloon in the sky you wouldn’t be curious or concerned at all.
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u/AnthillOmbudsman Feb 05 '23
Well for years there's been Google Loon balloons with the same dimensions floating over the US, so I don't think people have been paying much attention. This balloon was announced by the Pentagon when it was over Montana, so suddenly everyone's seeing it.
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u/creativename87639 Feb 05 '23
First of all I’ve never seen these balloons and if I saw a huge balloon in the sky (much larger than a weather balloon) I’d be curious and/or concerned as well. But also I decided to google Loon since I’ve never heard of it and
Project Loon began as a research and development project by X (formerly Google X) in 2011, but later spun out into a separate company in July 2018.[5] In January 2021, it was announced that the company would be shut down due to lack of profitability.
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u/IncidentalIncidence Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
and if I saw a huge balloon in the sky (much larger than a weather balloon)
I mean, this thing was at 100,000 feet, well above where most jets can fly. If you saw it it would be a white dot in the sky; you probably wouldn't even be able to tell that it was a balloon with your naked eye.
Edit: it was at 60,000 feet, not 100,000, but you get the point.
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u/TheCleaverguy Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
In the "unzoomed" video of the balloon being popped, the most visible thing was the jet trails.
Most people going about their daily life would not notice this, least of all connect it to a different country.
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u/wisertime07 Feb 05 '23
Fwiw, it was visible with the naked eye - LOTS of people were able to pick it out of the sky as it made its journey. A small white orb bobbing across the daytime sky, what else would people mistake it as?
On another note, why are people so damn defensive of China and this balloon? It illegally entered and traversed the entire continental US, it had every right to be taken down.
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u/Banshu Feb 06 '23
Im hearing people way we should have taken it down over the continental u.s. immediately because letting it fly over is embarrassing. Ive also heard we got everything out of its range and used digital warfare to block what we couldn't move and that letting it fly over gives us an understanding of what it was doing exactly and what they might have been looking for. I see the second option as better, shooting a balloon doesnt seem hard and doing it over your population seems dangerous. Also you get to flex your systems and show them you dont care what they try because you are steps ahead, and you shoot it down any way after words because you can.
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u/mauganra_it Feb 06 '23
Tbh, most of North America is quite thinly settled. But there are definitely places where it would be unnecessarily complicated to retrieve the wreckage.
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u/notmyfirstrodeo2 Feb 06 '23
But it would still be shameful if it landed on some farmhouse or started a forest fire.
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u/IncidentalIncidence Feb 05 '23
LOTS of people were able to pick it out of the sky as it made its journey
Yes, after the Pentagon put out a press release telling everybody there was a Chinese spy balloon over Montana. Telling the relative size of the balloon at that distance with no reference is basically not possible. It's like seeing a light in the distance at night, or the moon in the sky -- you have no visual reference to be able to tell how large it is.
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u/MerlinTheWhite Feb 06 '23
I've sent up full size weather balloons myself and they're basically impossible to see even if you are trying to look for it
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u/political_bot Feb 05 '23
The ISS is visible to the naked eye. But unless you know what you're looking for you'd think it was a weird moving star.
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u/corkyskog Feb 05 '23
I feel this thread is a little condescending. Whenever I am down south hanging out with my redneck family they point out the ISS before anyone can even whip out their phone to confirm it.
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u/political_bot Feb 06 '23
It's dope as hell. I have the NASA tracking app on my phone. It's only visible for a few minutes at dawn or dusk.
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u/IncidentalIncidence Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
absolutely, but you still have to know what you're looking for right? They point it out because they know what the ISS looks like in terms of how big the light is, how fast it's moving.
It's not being condescending to say that most people seeing the ISS wouldn't immediately think "oh look at that light that's moving across the sky, must be the ISS". Most people just wouldn't know what it is.
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u/GardenGnomeOfEden Feb 06 '23
By the way, you can get alerts for when the ISS will be passing over the location that you specify:
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u/IncidentalIncidence Feb 06 '23
But that didn't stop a million clickbait articles from being written about it, and tens of thousands of comments by frenzied Redditors rabidly speculating about what it all means.
I don't feel like anyone's really that worried about it. It's just weird -- of all the normal geopolitical hijinks that the secret services get up to, spy balloons sneaking across the canadian border was not on my bingo card. It's just a wacky story.
It's not really comparable to the actual paranoia of McCarthyism.
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u/Outlulz Feb 06 '23
Daily Mail theorized it had nuclear material, Fox News theorized it had a new virus that China was going to sprinkle all over the United States. People were out of their fucking mind over this.
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u/peepopowitz67 Feb 06 '23
Exactly. Saying people didn't get worked up about it is like saying nobody complained about M&Ms not being as fuckable anymore.
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u/Hot_Region_3940 Feb 06 '23
I think it’s more a response to the GOP hyperventilation over a balloon. The GOP response makes the story funny.
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u/person2567 Feb 06 '23
it was announced that the company would be shut down due to lack of profitability
Wow, a Google venture shutting down due to lack of profitability. I'm shocked.
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u/I_drink_your_pets Feb 05 '23
No wonder the government has been acting like they really care about alien UFOs. When you expect frequent intrusions in your airspace but don't want to deal with them, it's easier to blame the aliens.
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u/VegasKL Feb 05 '23
I'm pretty sure you see an uptick in government UFO crossover when there's a few black projects in testing.
It makes sense for them to steer into the paranormal element for the purpose of obfuscating the real questions about what people are seeing.
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u/SirJudasIscariot Feb 05 '23
No Tommy, that wasn’t a classified U-2 spy plane, it was aliens.
No Sally, that wasn’t a classified SR-71, it was aliens.
No Saddam, those weren’t F-117s and B-2s, those were aliens.
No China, this isn’t a super secret next-gen stealth aircraft your traitorous rats are committing espionage for. Those are aliens.
As every mention of the word ‘aliens’ increased, so too did the mad ravings of Giorgio Tsoukalos and his obsession with aliens, and while no one was paying any attention, his hair was slowly gaining sentience.
It’s always aliens, boys and girls. ALWAYS.
laughs brokenly over what the History Channel has become
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u/GotInterest Feb 06 '23
Didn’t they actually do this to a guy? Like that was a real story that got declassified a while back of a guy who lived near a testing facility and he reported what he saw to the government and they basically fed him the idea that it was aliens or something?
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u/O0O00O000O0000O Feb 05 '23
I mean that makes sense for the Tommy’s and the Sally’s of the world. It doesn’t make sense why the military would test their tech on other parts of the military after confirmed leaks occurred.
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u/SirJudasIscariot Feb 05 '23 •
What better way to test new technology is there than with some of the only people who could successfully find ways to combat it?
The Navy and the Air Force run their drills with their multimillion projects, the Army puts their new gear through stress tests and mock operations, and the Marines finally get their hands on the legendary 72 pack of Crayola crayons.
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u/SophiaofPrussia Feb 05 '23
Puts tin foil hat on.
Maybe those “reports” are just part of an elaborate cover-up.
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u/MeshColour Feb 06 '23
Woolams was known as a bit of a practical joker. While flying the still unknown experimental P-59 jet airplane, he would join formation with unsuspecting pilots flying propeller-driven fighters and to their surprise, wave at them while wearing a gorilla mask, bowler hat, and cigar, and then fly away leaving them behind.
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u/2OneZebra Feb 05 '23
CIA posted they were tracking all of them from launch
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u/Terr_ Feb 06 '23
Source? All I've seen so far is that NORAD detected it near the Aleutian islands, and everything before that is backtracking based on wind patterns.
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u/kcg5 Feb 06 '23
I’d guess we track nearly anything like that that launches from China. I do wonder why CiIA supposedly said that, when that’s not really their focus. The CIA isn’t out there tracking satellites or whatever
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u/idolpriest Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
How would people seeing it, know its a Chinese Spy Balloon, that info had to come from somewhere, I feel moderately intelligent people who see a big balloon in the sky (See it in the sky, is kind of loaded, it would probably be very hard to tell what it is without binoculars looking right at it) would just assume its a weather balloon.
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u/impy695 Feb 05 '23
How many people see weather balloons often enough that they wouldn't get excited and take a picture? I get excited anytime I see a blimp, and I see dozens every year. I'd definitely be pointing out a weather balloon to people.
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u/lestofante Feb 06 '23
And if the gov. Want to keep it secret, they will say weather balloon, we launched it, no stress, no worry.
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u/Crabby-as-hell Feb 06 '23
Where are you that you see dozens of blimps a year? I’ve probably see like 10 ever
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u/DFWPunk Feb 05 '23
It's easy enough to see that there's cell phone video of the shoot down.
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u/idolpriest Feb 06 '23
I mean't seeing it from the start, not after there is national headlines about it and F-22s circling it
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u/olivebars Feb 05 '23
People saw the balloon so our government told us what it is. What are you on about.
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u/idolpriest Feb 05 '23
So when people ask whats that thing flying in the sky, the government will just answer?
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u/NancyPelBroski Feb 05 '23
Or someone leaked it to try and undermine the current administration. When I heard about this story, my first thought was “surely this has happened before?”
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u/agreeingstorm9 Feb 05 '23
Why did people see this one but no one saw the other three?
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u/flappybirdie Feb 06 '23
It might have something to do with the altitude too, this was was flying pretty low compared to what they are usually supposed to fly at.
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u/ccaccus Feb 06 '23
Can't wait for the meteorologists to plead with people not to shoot down actual weather balloons.
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u/sarhoshamiral Feb 05 '23
Wasn't there an article last year about increasing incident of UFO reports in the past few years? I wonder if they are related.
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u/Heavy_Contribution18 Feb 06 '23
The tic tacs were moving in ways that break the laws of known physics.
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u/wastingvaluelesstime Feb 06 '23
if the observation makes you think physics is broken, it's always good to check for equipment error before getting too excited about it
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u/Heavy_Contribution18 Feb 06 '23
The us government put out a report of the hundreds of military uap sittings. Many were a result of faulty equipment or misreadings/ misunderstandings. The tic tacs are the common trend of being monitored with equipment and gauged by many professional eyes. If they are to be believed.
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u/chrontab Feb 05 '23
The Chinese: how do we sow more dissent and further polarize and weaken America?
The Russians: duuuuuhhhh no idea. Hey... have you tried a balloon?
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u/Karcinogene Feb 06 '23
At this point you can just do anything at all, and Americans will polarize over it.
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u/wefeelgood Feb 05 '23
Will someone please get this gentleman some tasty pizza & something to drink?
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u/geophilo Feb 05 '23
Pizza sounds great right now. Nothing like the back and forth of random reddit users to whet the appetite.
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u/GoDM1N Feb 06 '23
China reviewing the footage: WTF? Everywhere we zoom in its single family housing. Is that all America is?
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Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
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u/adognamedopie Feb 05 '23
What information is that balloon going to get that a satellite couldn't?
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u/digitil Feb 06 '23
Information about how the American government and people will react to a balloon, which they won't get from a satellite.
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u/im_not_the_right_guy Feb 06 '23
This is exactly what I was telling people when they asked me why I thought they'd even send one
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u/mpyne Feb 06 '23
- Higher resolution photography of terrestrial assets
- Intelligence gathering than can happen in the same general vicinity for hours, rather than minutes (a satellite is in orbit so it doesn't have a lot of time to take pictures of the same physical location)
- Intelligence that requires being below the ionosphere (e.g. some radio frequencies)
Those are just a few off the top of my head. The U.S. has continued to use manned and unmanned reconnaissance platforms for year after satellites were deployed. In fact the Global Hawk UAV is one of the most distinctive platforms of the entire War on Terror, despite the U.S. having satellites.
These intelligence-gathering platforms provide valuable information to somebody, and the same is presumably true of China's.
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u/awwwwwwwwwwwwwwSHIT Feb 06 '23
Radar, ground penetrating radar, possibly info on the fighter jet and missile that shot it down.
It's the reason the US has RC-135 information warfare planes. I would assume the balloon was doing similar research and surveillance.
Aka if WE need special planes to fulfill that mission role, it can't be done from space.
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u/deja-roo Feb 06 '23
I don't think ground penetrating radar works that far up.
And we've been shooting sidewinders for decades. Maybe it's possible they got some data on the plane that shot it I guess.
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u/CravenMerrill Feb 06 '23
Not really ground penetrating but we have satellites that can do about 3-6cm deep. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_Moisture_Active_Passive
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Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
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u/Target880 Feb 06 '23
Edit 2: I may have found the balloon advantage. Balloons can linger in an area. Satellites are orbiting have a limit time to see a specific geographic area. And the US would never stand for China have spy satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the US mainland.
There are two problems with that.
The main one is a geostationary orbit needs to be over the equator so you can have a geostationary satellite over US mainland.
The other is they already have one, TJS-7 is at 99.5 west. That is over the equator directy south of Texas. https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=49115
I am not saying the conclusion is incorrect in that you have longer time observation, You can pick up weaker signals and use optical sensors.
Geostationary orbit has an advantage but also disadvantages, the primary one is the distance of 35800 km from the ground. The resolution you have in optical observation will be quite limited, there is a reason imaging satellites both spy and commercial are at 600km or lower. You have whether satellites are there with resolution in the order of a km.
It is not just that it is hard to get something there with enough optical resolution, it is practically impossible. 1 meter on the ground for geostationary orbit have an angular size of 1.6 * 10-6 degrees = 2.8* 10-8 radians
the angular resolution limit of an optical system is θ ~ 1.22 λ/D Where where θ is the angular resolution (radians), λ is the wavelength of light, and D is the diameter of the lens' aperture.
If we use 550 nm = 550 *-9 for the middle of the visible spectrum the lense diameter needs to be 24 meters in diameter. If you like 0.5m ground resolution you need 48-meter diameter
So lots of spy satellites in lower orbit is a lot cheaper. US spy satellites look like Hubble with a mirror of 2.4 meters, at least the mirror in 1980 had that diameter, but they are still limited by the faring of the launch vehicle where the satellite's max diameter is 4.5 meters. They do not have found a mirror-like James Webb, the amateur has observed them from the ground and you can determine the size.
2.4 m mirror results in 6 cm ground resolution from 250km, that is if any atmospheric effects are removed
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u/PhillipBrandon Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
I've seen comments from folks who use similar balloons professionally that they can be equipped with ground-penetrating radar. How capable are satellites for that?
The balloon differs in several key ways from balloons used for weather. The US government characterizes it as a spy balloon.
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u/T_ja Feb 05 '23
I’ve seen posts from people in the industry that GPR would be useless at 60k ft. Same post stated that some drones use GPR less than 100ft off the ground and the data recorded from that is very rudimentary.
In fact the info I’ve found researching in google indicates that drones only take readings from the air if the resolution doesn’t matter. Typically they’d fly the drone into unreachable terrain then scan barely off the ground where they want the reading done for accuracy. I can’t find anything that suggests GPR is powerful enough to be used from 60k feet.
https://dronearrival.com/ground-penetrating-radar-on-a-drone/
That’s just one link that had a decent summary but I went down a rabbit hole.
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u/Defiant-Peace-493 Feb 05 '23
Eesh, Mars atmo is horribly thin. That balloon would be enormous!
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u/Defiant-Peace-493 Feb 05 '23
The Mars96 mission towards plante Mars was to deliver an atmospheris balloon whose metallic guiderope contained a ground penetrating radar that was to sound the planet subsurface up to a one kilometre depth
From linked paper. Typos in original.
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u/DannySpud2 Feb 05 '23
I wonder if part of it is just testing out an emergency backup in case the US shoots down a bunch of your spy satellites. They can test how quickly they can get a balloon over strategic targets in the US. Get experience manoeuvring in the wind currents over the US. See how quickly the balloon is detected. Check they can get enough data to be useful and that they can receive the data. See how difficult an operation it is for the US to take them down.
It might be no better than a spy satellite but it'll be far cheaper and quicker to launch one (or many) of these at short notice.
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u/jumper501 Feb 05 '23
The downside being that it shows your hand to the enemy. It won't be a surprise ever again, and we know we can shoot it down, only next time, it will be over alaska, before it makes it anywhere close to the mainland.
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u/TjW0569 Feb 05 '23
You're ten to twenty times closer, and moving more slowly. That allows small aperture, long exposure imaging. That's good for depth-of-field.
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u/DigNitty Feb 05 '23
Yeah but your depth of field is going to be set right at infinity anyway. The depth of field is 60,000ft away. You could put a wide open aperture on this thing and anything 400ft+ away is going to be in focus. Not sure why you’d improve on that unless you wanted to capture a bird flying at 59,600+ ft.
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u/reeeeeeeeeee78 Feb 05 '23 edited Feb 05 '23
Potentially other stuff. The US was flying those advanced stealth drones over Iran before they lost one. If they could do everything with satellites then they wouldn't have lost a hyper advanced next gen stealth drone. They had stuff that could sniff for radioactive particles for nuclear test sites. Lord knows what else. I'm sure half the gear on that is highly classified and the other half is unknown to the public or speculated capabilities. The nsa is always coming up with novel ways to spy in bizarre new ways, of course the NRO is too. The balloon clearly had some usage beyond what satellites can glean.
You could maybe make rough guesses about what kind of hardware it has if you knew it's flight path. Then you could narrow it down to what facilities it was looking at. Then think about what type of tech could be useful for examining say nuclear launch sites, maybe missile defense sites.
The people who launched it, and the guys recovering it from the ocean are the two parties who will be able to tell you exactly what it was doing. Beyond that it's mostly guesses, educated or otherwise.
In terms of the linger in area advantage. Both the US and China field those space planes that probably can do that. So I'm guessing it's more then just that.
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u/y-c-c Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
Balloons and satellites have very different properties. As you said, satellites can’t just linger at one place. It has to orbit Earth (look up “orbital parameters” for the exact parameters that define an orbit if you are curious) which usually means you can observe one spot maybe once or twice a day. Geostationary satellites can stay in one spot but it’s much much higher up, has to be above the equator, and really expensive (and obvious). Also, satellites are publicly tracked (just for fun, go to https://sky.rogue.space to check them out) so everyone knows where most of the satellites are and it’s very hard to be “secret”. Military operations can intentionally schedule around spy satellites to make sure important stuff don’t get spotted.
Balloons on the other hand can linger and move around freely. You can literally observe a spot 24/7 if you don’t end up drifting away, compared to just a couple times (at most) a day. They are also much cheaper and less noticeable (in a way) compared to satellites.
Also, the ballon is also ~12km above ground compared to at least a few hundred kilometers for low earth orbit so you are much closer to ground. I would imagine you can capture much better information that way (inverse square law) if you can equip it with decent enough sensors. I wonder if the fact that it’s within the atmosphere still allows it to capture data that otherwise wouldn’t be possible with satellites.
The one glaring issue with balloons is that balloons operate well within the 100km altitude limit (which marks the beginning of space) so they are still part of a country’s airspace and territory. With satellites it’s fair game because there is no sovereignty / territory in space (e.g. you can’t just claim you own the moon just because it is currently directly over US and whatnot).
Source: used to write flight software for spacecrafts and satellites.
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u/Buttfulloffucks Feb 05 '23
Former defence secretary Mark Esper has come out to state that he had no knowledge of such balloons during has time in the trump white House. However, the DOD reportedly knew of said balloons but didn't think it serious enough to have made a fuss about it. Trump himself was not informed. It is known that the Chinese regularly send up such balloons as a means to gather intel(they already have satellites for that so it is strange why they use balloons).
What i find funny is the outrage on the right because of this incident. They seem to have forgotten that chinese spies infiltrated Mar a Lago where top secret US documents where stored illegally.
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u/Atheios569 Feb 05 '23
Cheaper, higher quality data, and clearly it worked except for this time. Frankly it’s very refreshing to have a somewhat transparent administration.
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u/C0matoes Feb 06 '23
This is just a question here but give me a second. A Ballon, which we tracked when it left China, came across Alaska into mainland us, across it, slowly, and you and I are really supposed to believe, that it was allowed to send a single piece of data back to China while doing so? I think such a thing would be underestimating the us military machine greatly.
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u/edjumication Feb 06 '23
Or they are not concerned about that data it is gathering.
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u/nemec Feb 06 '23
Chinese defense analyst:
This data is a gold mine! Did you know it snows in Montana in the winter? Like all over the ground!
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u/D74248 Feb 05 '23
What i find funny is the outrage on the right because of this incident.
They got upset with a brown suit. They act like two year olds.
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u/lokken1234 Feb 06 '23
I mean we had 2 scoops with Trump, I don't think Anyone is older than 3 in this country. We're all just kids in trench coats convincing other kids were adults.
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u/SpaceCowboy34 Feb 06 '23
I love how this pissing match became the story. We’re governed by idiots
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u/Astavri Feb 06 '23
It's the news outlets. They seem to be getting clicks from stupid shit like this.
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u/RandomlyActivated Feb 06 '23
We always have been. It’s just that we are able to see it in full view now.
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u/tehgalvanator Feb 06 '23
The government’s nonchalant response makes me think that we are probably doing the same thing in other countries. But I will admit it was sick seeing that jet shoot down that balloon.
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u/EquilibriumBoosted Feb 05 '23
And then there's tik tok. Maybe that's too much cognitive dissonance to bring up.
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u/lessfrictionless Feb 06 '23
Honest question, what do the balloons tell China that google street view won't?
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u/GruesumGary Feb 06 '23
I'm sure these balloons have been around for years. I wouldn't be surprised if the US has used something similar in other countries as well. Not to mention the fact that the US openly spies on other countries with drones and satellites, and the public has no issues with it. It's always been absurd to me that we have zero issues with this country completely destroying and occupying another territory, but the minute it's done by someone other than the US, we're up in arms.
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u/ShabbyKitty35 Feb 06 '23 •
What’s more absurd to me is that people who have zero issues with this country spying are somehow amazed that other countries do it to us. Does everyone who’s up in arms about this balloon or other possible previous balloons live with their head in the sand?
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u/BenTallmadge1775 Feb 06 '23
Discovered after the administration left office and not detected at the time of flight. So the question is now why did intelligence officials not advise the president of possible courses of action when the ballon was passing over the Aleutian Islands. Especially since Elmendorf AFB has squadrons of F-22 and F-35 fighters capable of responding prior to further incursion of US airspace? Also who is going to resign or be fired for not proactively advising (dereliction of duty) national command authority of this incursion?
But on Sunday, a senior administration official said that "U.S. intelligence, not the Biden administration" assesses that "PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time."
The official also said that "this information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left."
"They went undetected," the official was quoted as saying.
So yes it did happen. No it was not known at the time. It is also a larger pattern of intelligence gathering by the PLA.
This is a problem. Intelligence and military officials not proactively advising national command authority is also a problem. They need to be fired for dereliction of duty.
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u/iambarrelrider Feb 06 '23 •
The best balloons, they were huge, everyone loved them…