China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
More details: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starshield_(satellite_constellati...
If they wanted low key interception of civilian terrestrial radio signals, seems like it would be better to just rent a Uhaul or RV, load it up with radio gear, and drive it across the country.
US can always launch more and for these LEO constellations it's all about numbers.
I wouldn't expect to see spy satellites from the SDA; the NRO has always controlled those. I could believe small spy satellites if launched from NRO. There haven't been any details on how missile defense will work from space with small satellites. The descriptions I've seen have been about communication and detecting hypersonic weapons with infrared sensors. The latter is not what I would think of as spy satellite or missile defense.
But for your question, with LEO satellites you don't really target specific countries. They cover every country within a given latitude range. A round LEO orbit that goes over the US must also go over China.
However you don't need geostationary orbits to target a given part of the globe. Molniya orbits do the same thing more or less and work better if you want coverage further away from the equator. They were popularized by the USSR and the US and China use them to varying extents.
Idk how many companies/govs have this capability but: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/
Here is the submitted flight plan https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
https://x.company/projects/loon/
Rather than being all secretive, it would be just as easy to blame some new upstart company being a little more cavalier than Google.
UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
Right, that's why we should only ever trust Radio Free Asia for our news sources about what's happening internationally
Check your source, per your cited wiki page: > The shootdown, and the subsequent creation of a record-setting amount of in-orbit debris, drew serious international criticism.[15][16][17][18][19]
The shootdown refers to the ASAT test on FY-1C
For the reference [15] http://www.centerforspace.com/asat/, cannot be opened, the site is unreachable.
For [16] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17497766 It's referring to a debris from Russia rocket, itself is a routine affair in the space. > The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took refuge in escape capsules as a piece of space junk hurtled by. > The debris - a discarded piece of Russian rocket - was detected on Friday when it was too late to move the ISS.
For reference [17], a piece from BCC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6276543.stm BCC's reporting on China is about as accurate as Fox's reporting on Democratic party. Go figure
For reference [18], an intro page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse AFP Not sure what's relevance with a ASAT
For reference [19], https://www.npr.org/2007/01/19/6923805/chinese-missile-destr... > The governments of Britain, Japan and Australia are voicing concern over China's apparent test of an anti-satellite missile. The United States says China shot down one of its own aging weather satellites last week, in a kind of target practice in low Earth orbit. > "I was surprised that they were able to do it," Kristensen says. Seems about routine as any space tests...
Then the conclusion is that China's ASAT test is "the worst in history." With evidences that are as substantial as web3's value to society.
This type of post on HN is simply not passing the quality bar on HN...
(I don't think this is realistic, just musing about other schemes that could be going on.)
e.g., if the dangerous substance in question was a gas mix for the balloon or cooling liquid for the payload, or "Whoops, how did those fruit fly capsules get in there and accidentally drift over California?!"
I'd say the balloons are chosen for a reason. Send surveillance craft over the USA and a huge percentage of the population would see it as an intrusion. Let balloons float over and some of the population will be: just weather balloons, we're wasting missiles; I haven't seen the balloons so they're making this up so China looks bad; what if the wreckage lands on a school, etc. Surveillance and destabilisation, is my guess.
Where's the line drawn if the dangerous thing I mentioned before has a practical use? Maybe the balloon is filled with a mix that is toxic to something (crop, livestock, etc). Or there's a component of the payload that is dangerous when hit by a missile or making contact with the ground?
I'm guessing China sees this all as low risk research and nothing more exciting than that, but just trying to imagine what else might be going on, or come next. (I'm not anywhere near either China or the US.)
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/how...
That might seem absurd, but I believe a lot of countries have made a similar argument for pollutants and waste they dump into the air or water. It took decades for instance to get Canada to stop dumping (literal) shit in waters that end up in Puget Sound [1].
A kind of negative of this arises too, when someone takes something out of the atmosphere or water that passes through their territory and someone downstream had been using that thing.
Generally countries don't really do well when it comes to shared resources like atmospheres and oceans and rivers as far as what happens when one does something involving that resource in their territory that affects it in someone else's territory.
[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/victoria-bc-will-finally-...
Any airliner is a flying object full of dangerous chemicals, flammable and toxic.
I won't elaborate as the topic is complicated.
The bigger question to think about is the fear itself that led you to this question, the fear, the vulnerability and the anxiety you are feeling. Perhaps if americans weren't so frightened all the time there would be less wars?
'The bigger question to think about is the fear itself that led you to this question, the fear, the vulnerability and the anxiety you are feeling. Perhaps if americans weren't so frightened all the time there would be less wars?'
I'm not American. I live almost about as far from the US as it's possible to live on this earth and don't feel any anxiety about this. Just a curious observer.
I'm not sure what anxiety it is that you're talking about.
As an American, I'm not anxious or afraid "all the time." In fact, I'm generally relaxed and happy.
Sure, some folks have anxiety issues. But that's not limited to Americans, is it?
While more people in developed countries are prescribed anti-anxiety meds[0] than elsewhere, such folks are a small fraction (~5%) of the global population.
And so I'll ask you, of what exactly, do you think that Americans are "so frightened all the time?"
Listening to politicians blather on about "keeping Americans safe" and the like, which is pure theater that's designed to generate votes, is a poor idea if you want to understand how Americans actually think and feel.
These recent shoot downs are an excellent example. No one complained when similar balloons flew over the US before. Why? Because our military deemed them not to be a threat. And no one cared.
The Chinese surveillance balloon was deemed not to be a threat (as was alluded to in this week's public briefing of Congress) and even when it passed over "sensitive installations," countermeasures were put in place to mitigate any intelligence gathering.
That one group made a big deal about it (even though when this happened previously, they were (in closed session) briefed on the matter, and the public was none the wiser.
The difference now is that the public is aware of this stuff and rather than focusing on maintaining and strengthening national security, some folks are attempting to use this to win political points.
Shooting down the Chinese balloon was probably a good idea in order to better understand Chinese technology in this space, and knowing what the Chinese wanted to look at gives us even more information.
As such, jamming/restricting encrypted comms/camouflaging such sites (again as was alluded to by DoD representatives in an open committee hearing, with promises of more detail about that in closed session) and then taking the vehicle down in an area where civilians aren't at risk was smart.
Shooting down those other objects was a direct response (and serves the same purpose) to the political posturing about the Chinese balloon. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
[0] https://www.ihealthcareanalyst.com/global-anxiety-disorders-...
I'm being picky but still
As far as missiles go, I wonder if you even need any weapons to down a balloon? A supersonic pass in its general vicinity would hit it with a shock wave and a lot of turbulence. Would that be enough to damage it sufficiently to down it?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonytellez/2023/02/08/here-a...
The F-22 was probably used in the most popular case as a show of force.
Edit: looks like I was wrong. The balloons were only 40-60k feet, which is within the range of military aircraft. reply
https://weatherscientific.com/collections/weather-balloons/p...
Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...
People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.
The one civilization that somehow missed gravity manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.
This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.
It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.
Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.
However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.
Same thing for aliens, imagine an alien refugee ship capable of FTL but needs a special fuel that it has to collect from deep Earth ocean very slowly, perhaps for a few million years because Earth only has very very few of such fuel. There is not much the refugees can do. They don't have weapons, they still habe to gather food and energy, they can't do a lot of bad things to locals (us)
So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.
Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.
(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)
0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/261470/Distant_Worlds_Uni...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAAHgAuti84
Also, in the Watchman comic the world is made believe in an alien invasion to bring world peace (the ending is different in the move).
So let's hope that if these are (real of fake) aliens, the result will be a more peaceful world.
There’s something hilarious about the idea that, if this was the start of an alien invasion, our journalists and politicians started off the coverage not being curious about what on Earth these objects were, but instead slinging political slime at each other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_balloon
>Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily.
On the other hand, weather balloons are not silver-gray and cylindrical. A Google image search shows them almost always white and spherical to teardrop shape and pretty much unmistakably a balloon.
Not to say one of these can't be a weather balloon, but I would expect these also are known possibilities / somewhat detectable / aren't trying to be sneaky ...
https://www.overlookhorizon.com/how-to-launch-weather-balloo...
We did a balloon launch a long time ago, it had a radio sending back telemetry and we chased it across Colorado scrub land hundreds of miles.
So it is possible that trigger-happy NORAD is shooting down a lot of perfectly harmless stuff now.
Are the electronics in these balloons recovered eventually? Or is it just basically e-waste?
Not only did our balloon have the parachute and radar reflector, we also put blinking lights on it. Since there was no transmitter on it, I had to call 2 different phone numbers to give status updates to report anticipated altitude progress. The first was the regional airport, and the second number was the larger airport 2 hours away that we were in the line of their approach pattern. The first airport would then notify the closer joint air base that they did not feel like we needed to call directly. At one point, we lost contact with our cheap GPS because it reached altitudes beyond what the company anticipated civilians to be doing. ATC informed us they were tracking it, and we were a little off in our altitude estimates within 5000'.
All of that to say, no, it was not e-waste. we got it all back minus the bits of the balloon that exploded into pieces no longer attached.
[0]https://www.stratoflights.com/en/tutorial/weather-balloon-to...
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/drones-may-replace-wea...
https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162414986417840128...
Also that we are seeing a lot more now because we have turned down/off the filters on the radars. Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives.
https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162461466198661120...
This whole thing is just genius on so many levels. Exploit the stigma about aliens by constructing small drones and make them appear wacky beyond belief to guarantee they'll go unreported. Exploit the radar filters for small and slow moving craft with motionless soft balloons. And it worked brilliantly.
> I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves. Their lack of imagination, curiosity, and creativity appears to have built a near-perfect vacuum that our enemies could exploit and likely have exploited to an astonishing degree.
Perhaps we can, but clearly we can expect to find actual UAVs corresponding to these radar signals.
If these UAVs that have been shot down were domestic research balloons or some other aircraft exempt from FAA regulation, then we can expect a party to come forward and publicly acknowledge ownership/control of the UAV.
However, based on the descriptions of the object over Alaska it seems very likely there are indeed unmanned drones being operated by foreign governments and not domestic weather/research balloons or FAA compliant unregistered domestic aircraft.
Keep in mind that not only US or Canada launches weather balloons. These things are well capable of flying huge distances, including across the oceans. There has been one launched by amateur radio operators a few years ago that has circumnavigated the globe - and that's not at all a rare feat.
See e.g.:
https://qrp-labs.com/circumnavigators.html
So no need to go all conspirationalist about "unmanned drones operated by foreign governments" just yet. Especially given the distances and altitudes these things were found flying at - a heavier than air device would need a ton of fuel and energy to fly that high and that far, so a "drone" that at the same time doesn't look like an aircraft is rather unlikely.
This may be true, but it's awful hard to get visual confirmation and then shoot down a false positive.
That's easy to say, but does anyone know how many objects appear when you drop the filter? Yes, the military has a huge budget, but it's not unlimited. My guess is when you lower the filter you're met with so many objects that you couldn't possibly address them all with the resources you have available.
Imagine you have 10 resources to deploy and a screen with 100 objects to investigate. You lower the filter and there are now a million objects to investigate. It's not hard to understand why the filters were in place and saying they were "asleep" is silly. There have probably been people at the DoD asking for more resources ($) to remove the filters for years.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23733/spacex-exec-says...
The only new aspect is that you are being told about it. Which is unfortunately probably not a good sign. At best it will be only used to justify the purchase of some expensive "hi tech" boondoggle to counter these... balloons.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/latest-flying-objects-shot-down...
https://nypost.com/2023/02/12/latest-2-objects-shot-down-by-...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-seen-using-radar...
https://www.overlookhorizon.com/how-to-launch-weather-balloo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...
The AIM-9L doesn't lock on to the hottest thing, it takes an IR picture of the scene and follows the targeted "blob" in the image that's generated. Additionally it has laser proximity fusing so it knows when it is close to the shape it is tracking. By not simply picking the hottest thing in a scene you can't hide in front of the sun anymore, and the effectiveness of flares is reduced.
The only thing needed to generate a "blob" good enough to target is sufficient ΔT between the scene and the targeted object.
The objects, and they have been curiously consistent with calling them "objects", definitely have sufficient ΔT compared to the background sky if they are made of any solid material that has been exposed to sunlight for any period of time.
Isn't heat detected by infrared? What's the difference?
Countermeasures like flares try to trick a missile's sensor into thinking the hot object it was staring at was the flare going that way and not the maneuvering aircraft going the other way. Modern IR tracking missiles try to stay locked on the object by ignoring hotter or cooler objects that might end up in its view.
That's the extent of my knowledge about the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
(/s, if that was necessary to clarify)
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scrambling the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
Only got the season wrong …
Fitting prelude and postlude to Alphaville - Forever Young...
This makes the Goldfinger cover (which is awesome) make all the more sense. At one point he starts singing in German and I always just assumed it was for style. In reality - he's singing the "real" song, and one of the most critical parts "censored" for the English version. This is what he's singing in German:
----
"Ninety-nine ministers of war
Matches and petrol cans (gasoline cans)
They regarded themselves as clever people
Already on the scent of fat quarry
They shouted "War" and wanted power
Man, who would have thought
That someday it would come as far as this
Because of ninety-nine balloons"
----
It's a shame he stops there since the German ending is also dramatically better, "Ninety-nine years of war. Left no place for victors. There are no longer any ministers of war. And also no jet fighters. Today I'm making my rounds. I see the world lying in ruins. I have found a balloon. I think of you and let it fly."
The English version ending speaks in metaphor and can even be interpreted to mean it might have just been a dream.
----
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDc
Goldfinger Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQFplXS0DIM
English Lyrics ("censored") - https://genius.com/Nena-99-red-balloons-lyrics
English Lyrics (translated from German) - https://lyricstranslate.com/en/99-Luftballons-99-Luftballons...
I guess they meant red in the sense of "communist" though...
I won't elaborate as the topic is complicated.
> can China shoot down one of US’ low orbit satellites saying it flew over its airspace?
These balloons beg that question.... The first one was even made to look like a satellite.
A cylinder that was 20’ long, and 5’ in radius (which is a lot bigger than my minivan - would be about 1570 cubic feet.
That could lift about 100lbs at sea level… at flight level 400… that’s going to have to be a huge balloon to lift 100 lbs or the payload has to be tiny tiny - which is possible but I don’t think something the size of a car is adequate.
That being said, ultralight glider technology is actually really good. It is plausible with ultralight materials you could build a car-sized thing, put it on some kind of solar-powered glider and keep it in the air for a long time.
pilot selection of aim9 over guns due to difficulty/risk of engagement is concerning. would really like recoverable intel, or at least some more detailed assessment prior to engagement.
I'm assuming this information is just not being released, but it begs for obvious scrutiny.
we want a picture
“A unidentified object has been shot down by U.S. forces over Lake Huron, according to the Department of Defense. The object appears to be the same object that had been detected over Montana a day earlier, said officials.“
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/12/1156428862/us-shoot-down-ufo-...
The air defense folks increased the sensitivity of radars and started finding the UFOs. Maybe the UFOs were keeping away from population areas and radars but now were being picked up.
It is strange that the objects aren't stealthed. Which makes sense for balloon payload. But stealth, hovering, car-sized objects should be hard to detect. Maybe aliens don't know about stealth. The other weird thing is that they just hover. For advanced or alien technology, I would expect them to move away or dodge.
1. Are we just seeing more of these things now, due to the US broadening the scope of their radar filtering, and there were always this number of things floating around and now they're just more aware of them?
2. Has something changed in the upper atmosphere/jet stream that's catching balloons that would have previously blown elsewhere, and are now going over the US by accident?
3. Is some really big budget scifi coming out soon, and some marketing team thought that after the chinese balloon thing, launching a ton of cheap weather balloons painted silver would be a cool guerrilla marketing campaign for it?
It could be for a couple different reasons and/or a combination of them, but included in those are probably things like distraction from the lies, failure, and collapse in Ukraine or even the “OMG, it’s UFOs” now is to prevent that huge toxic chemical catastrophe in Ohio taking peoples attention. But maybe it’s even just priming people for the minutes of hate to initiate Oceana’s war with Eurasia that we have always been in.
The social engineers in the government constantly misdirect and redirect attention by using their patsies in the media companies, so it’s not like it doesn’t happen. And now we have AI generated propaganda to look forward to an even more efficient psychosis inducing stream of lies.
What I’m more curious about is how otherwise smart people are so easily redirected and played tricks on as if they’re babies, too they point they don’t even realize the magic smoke and mirrors show happening as the ball disappears and reappears in the other hand and the young attractive lady survived being sawed in half.
Boop! The government’s got your nose! What will you do without your nose. Boop! Ok, it put it back. Phew! That was close!
The first balloon didn’t have this consideration because it could be seen from the ground.
So they call it an object because that's what they know.
Even if it was full of plutonium, there probably is no better place for it to come down.
Because they are potential hazards and threats.
> How do we know there is no dangerous material in them (e.g. radioactive)?
Any material falling from a high altitude is dangerous, which figures into decisions about where and when to shoot them down. But if someone is floating hazardous payloads without permission and notice over your airspace, you probably don’t want to give them the choice of whether and when they come down....
Then you haven't been paying attention. Because we're starting to get those answers.
There has been (and that was just last week), an open Senate committee hearing[0] with DoD officials about the balloon, a classified briefing about same and a press briefing[1] by Senators after the classified hearing.
I watched the Senate hearing and got lots of good information, with even more info gleaned from stuff alluded to and teased to the Senators for the classified hearing.
With much more to come once the House comes back into session I'm sure.
[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?525930-1/defense-department-of...
[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?525949-1/senators-speak-closed...
The resources (including “human resources”) we use to check the sky are not the same resources used to track undersea threats. If anything, an elevated general state of alert from probing in the one domain makes it more, not less, likely than any intrusion in the other would be detected.
Like this could mean that there was only octagonal object, the balloon was octagonal, or the payload was octagonal. The latter seems the most plausible. It is hard to tell if this is more balloons or something really weird.
>The object was shaped like an octagon with strings hanging off it and no discernible payload, according to [a senior administration official] and another source briefed on the matter.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/object-shot-down-lake...
Any information given to the public (you) will also seen by the enemy (whoever it is)
It's like when America used to go on television during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and announce where they were going to do surprise attacks and then get butthurt when they got wiped out.
There's endless good reasons in the intelligence business to keep things secret.
Fighter jets don't just sit in hangars all day. They're no good without trained pilots.
That is what is currently happening, and it’s a little odd that the linked article didn’t seem to mention this. Divers with special cold water gear are being sent to fetch debris from this latest object, and a similar situation is going on for the others.
Look aliens!!!!!!!
Probably the best stealth there is: to be classed as noise.
In fact, the NOAA launches dozens of weather balloons daily.
Seems like recent attention is causing a bit of an over correction.
anyone have any info on if this could be a similar ufo?
[0] ADVCE20 from Phoenix https://fr24.com/ADVCE20/2f2d34d7
edit: superbowl
Now that they’ve said that, I’m actually more concerned and it raises more questions than it answers. Perspective of some retired NORAD employee would be very welcome
Perhaps there’s some system where downvotes encourage a post to be taken off the front page quicker. But I suspect moderator involvement. Which is misguided if so: people will simply post dupes and continue to upvote them. Thus, the story is still on the front-page, but in a fragmented manner.
How much food and housing, medical care and education could that have provided?
They need to find a way to deal with this for $100 a pop or it's going to get stupid.
A high altitude glider being repurposed for surveillance seems like a plausible explanation for all this.
That is why spy satellites at much lower altitudes can be useful to spy on other countries. However anything below 100 km is considered an intrusion into the sovereign airspace of a country.
Why can't we just hook them to a tether on the ground and get some free air balloons?
(mostly kidding...)
I think that the US Air Force had been feeling a little left aside when it comes to the whole war thing, what with all the discussion about tanks and artillery and related stuff, this is the perfect opportunity for them to show that they're worth all the money the US taxpayer is throwing at them.
