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China balloon: US shoots down airship over Atlantic
The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.
The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over US territorial waters.
Three airports were shut and airspace was closed off the coast of North and South Carolina as the military carried out the operation on Saturday.
Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling to the sea after a small explosion.
An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile - an AIM-9X Sidewinder - and it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 14:39 EST (19:39 GMT), a defence official told reporters.
US President Joe Biden had been under pressure to shoot the balloon down since defence officials first announced they were tracking it on Thursday.
Second balloon spotted over Latin America:
On Friday, the Pentagon said a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted - this time over Latin America with reported sightings over Costa Rica and Venezuela.
See also:
US downs Chinese balloon, a flashpoint in US-China tensions
From China to Big Sky: The Balloon That Unnerved the White House
3 Navy Warships, FBI Now Hunting for Wreckage of Chinese Spy Balloon off South Carolina
Biden's 'Sputnik moment': Is China's spy balloon political warfare?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04 2023, @11:17PM (12 children)
Wiki says they cost anywhere from $200k to $400k each, and it also tells me the F-22 has a 20mm cannon. Is it really that hard to shred the balloon with bullets? Serious question. Did we play ourselves even more than we have already? Really. If this thing was tracked as long as they claim, why wasn't it downed over some remote part of Alaska, or in the northern Pacific Ocean as it *approached* US territory?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04 2023, @11:29PM (1 child)
Jets can't fly high enough for the guns to be effective. If these balloons are made like they make high altitude scientific balloons, bullets aren't any good anyway [irishtimes.com] (that balloon was vented down to a much lower altitude where the jets could shoot their guns). They would poke a bunch of holes that would vent the gas over time.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Monday February 06 2023, @12:05AM
Absolutely.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weather-balloon-canada-china-1.6737831 [www.cbc.ca]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday February 04 2023, @11:57PM (1 child)
It's likely just putting the F-22 in the air was a loss:
( https://executiveflyers.com/how-much-does-an-f22-raptor-cost/ [executiveflyers.com] )
I'm not sure how long it will take to China to get a clue... But I've prepared the theme music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDc [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2023, @03:42AM
Yeah but those are tax dollars, they don't count. Helicopter loads of cash more that $10B "went missing" in Iraq. Pittance compared to the $3-4T budget, which itself is pittance compared to what we hand out to banks and businesses when, ahem...wait... ok, "the economy is bad".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday February 05 2023, @05:50AM (5 children)
The whole story is pretty fishy. There are special carveouts in aviation law for balloons because they can't be steered, so how did this one magically fly over lots of sensitive US military facilities? And given that you could see it from the ground and pretty much the whole world was being informed about its progress it's got to be the least effective spying tool ever. If it was really packed full of Top Sikrit commie spying gear would they really float it straight into the hands of US analysts?
I'd really love to know what really happened here, rather than the random speculation and fancy Tora Bora tunnel kingdom-style diagrams where people get to invent whatever magic capabilities they feel like.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by toddestan on Sunday February 05 2023, @07:56AM (2 children)
Balloons can't be steered directly, but you can control where they go to some extent by changing altitude and catching wind streams moving in different directions. If that good enough to take it on a tour of a bunch of sensitive US military facilities, that I don't know.
If you ask me, it was more of a test by China to see how and if the US reacted.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Sunday February 05 2023, @08:15AM
I reckon it was an attempt by Aliexpress to compete with Amazon's drone delivery system. I bet when they pick up the pieces it'll be a consignment of fish pillows, 10,000mAh 18650s, toilet seat night lights, and fake poo.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday February 05 2023, @07:16PM
The government fellow on the news this morning said it had four fans to steer it.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 06 2023, @04:52PM (1 child)
Including the fact it happened several times during the Trump admin and nobody gave a crap! [forbes.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 07 2023, @03:15AM
I'm still puzzled by the whole thing. The entire world knew about it so it's the least secret spying mission ever. China knew it was effectively handing everything in/on/under the balloon to the US government for analysis so they'd had to have used decades-old non-sensitive tech in it, meaning they'd get very low-grade whatever it was they were after. The thing moves about half as fast as a heavily sedated sloth and is clearly visible so people would have hours of advance notice to throw a tarp over anything they didn't want the balloon to see, beyond the things that you could see anyway on Google Earth. And it's at best marginally maneuverable, you can nudge a balloon in a certain direction provided there's little to no wind but not much beyond that.
And from the US side, they didn't shoot it down for so long because they were afraid it might land on something? To a first-order approximation a lot of the US between a strip down the east and west coasts is empty, there's thousands of square miles over which they could have shot it down without hitting someone. Shit, a friend of mine said they could even use his farm for it (South Dakota), unless they happen by a million-to-one chance to hit his house or barn there's nothing on there except scattered cows, and that's not even counting the vast tracts of absolute nothing in places like Nevada. Drove down one of the lesser-used roads that comes out near Tonopah some years ago and for the entire three-hour drive we didn't see one single living thing, and that was somewhere that actually had a road through it.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday February 05 2023, @07:19PM
I don't know enough about cannons to answer but the shells would have had to climb quite a distance:
"The F-22 fired the Sidewinder at the balloon from an altitude of 58,000 feet. The balloon at the time was between 60,000 and 65,000 feet.", defense.gov.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday February 12 2023, @01:11AM
Well, they've since downed another over Alaska, and there's reportedly another one since then.
China doing everything to excess, I expect there are dozens.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.