News Chinese Spy Balloons Used American Tech, Report Says

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One of the balloons was even American made! RIP K9YO-15. The government spent ~$500,000 to shoot down a ~$20 Ham radio hobby balloon.
 
I sure would appreciate more detail, though I assume that's all that has been released? For one thing, I'd love to know why they're so sure it didn't transmit any of the data it collected.

It sure seemed to be remotely navigated, based on the path it took and the way it seemed to linger over certain key strategic locations, in spite of prevailing air currents. I guess it could've been preprogrammed with a list of potential targets and just tried to gather data on the ones closest to where the wind took it.

As for American tech, it's unsurprising that an advanced craft wouldn't have at least some US made/designed sensors and devices. IMO, that's the least surprising fact in the article.
 
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davisch said:
One of the balloons was even American made! RIP K9YO-15. The government spent ~$500,000 to shoot down a ~$20 Ham radio hobby balloon.
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It's an understandable overreaction. The way I heard it explained, US defense radars are tuned to ignore all the multitudes of weather and hobbyist balloons up there. After this high-profile incident, they naturally disabled some of these filters and chose to err on the side of caution.

Yes, it's expensive to shoot something down with a precision munition, but you wouldn't want anything less - especially if you weren't sure whether it could be hostile.

The important thing is that sensors and tactics seem to have successfully adapted, given that we haven't heard of ongoing issues with shoot-downs of nonthreatening objects.


On a related topic, I've been wondering for a while about high-altitude drones. A light-weight craft with large enough wings could conceivably stay aloft indefinitely, just using solar power. At similar altitudes, it'd be a lot harder to see than such a massive balloon.
 
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bit_user said:
On a related topic, I've been wondering for a while about high-altitude drones. A light-weight craft with large enough wings could conceivably stay aloft indefinitely, just using solar power. At similar altitudes, it'd be a lot harder to see than such a massive balloon.
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That would be an Airbus Zephyr.
en.wikipedia.org

Airbus Zephyr - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The most recent one was in the air for 64 days nonstop.
 
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bit_user said:
I sure would appreciate more detail, though I assume that's all that has been released? For one thing, I'd love to know why they're so sure it didn't transmit any of the data it collected.

It sure seemed to be remotely navigated, based on the path it took and the way it seemed to linger over certain key strategic locations, in spite of prevailing air currents. I guess it could've been preprogrammed with a list of potential targets and just tried to gather data on the ones closest to where the wind took it.

As for American tech, it's unsurprising that an advanced craft wouldn't have at least some US made/designed sensors and devices. IMO, that's the least surprising fact in the article.
Click to expand...
Just my speculation here, but one of two navigation methods could have been used if the balloon was not in contact with home base.

1. Night time star chart based position recognition, then inertial navigation during the day until it can look at the stars again to calculate its new position. They would have to program in the star positions above each target before the balloon is released.

2. Terrain following navigation similar to the US Tomahawk cruise missile. The navigation computer would be loaded with a detailed topographical map of its flight path then the balloon uses radar or a camera to recognize topographic features.
 
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The Historical Fidelity said:
Just my speculation here, but one of two navigation methods could have been used if the balloon was not in contact with home base.

1. Night time star chart based position recognition, then inertial navigation during the day until it can look at the stars again to calculate its new position. They would have to program in the star positions above each target before the balloon is released.

2. Terrain following navigation similar to the US Tomahawk cruise missile. The navigation computer would be loaded with a detailed topographical map of its flight path then the balloon uses radar or a camera to recognize topographic features.
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Or, just GPS.
 
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USAFRet said:
Or, just GPS.
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I thought of that, but it reminded me of this:

"... the drone was captured by jamming both satellite and land-originated control signals to the UAV, causing the UAV to fall back to GPS autopilot. Iran followed up by a GPS spoofing attack that fed the UAV false GPS data to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its home base in Afghanistan."

Iran–U.S. RQ-170 incident - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Harder to do, if you don't know where it's trying to go. I'm sure the altitude wouldn't make it that easy, either.
 
When China (or Russia, for that matter) says that something is so, in actuality, the exact opposite is true. I'm zero percent surprised that these turn out to be spy balloons because china denied that they were spy balloons.

China also said "why would we use spy balloons when we have satellites to do that". Sine the exact opposite of what China says is true, that means that they either have no spy satellites, or those satellites don't work well enough to be of use, hence the need for spy-balloons.
 
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bit_user said:
Satellites fly at a much higher altitude. Not only should a balloon be able to capture better pictures, it can probably do a lot more in the realm of RF surveillance.
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Actually the use of spy balloons is kinda smart. The US military has been tracking foreign military satellites reliably for the last 50 years and, since satellite orbits are like clock work unless the satellite operator decides to use up the satellites limited fuel supply to alter its orbit, its standard protocol for US military secret assets to be secured out of view of foreign military satellites whenever they are above the US. So a spy balloon has a higher chance of being able to see US secret assets out in the open given their random appearance and undetermined flight path.

Also, since NORAD just came out with a press release saying that before the Chinese balloon incident it was standard protocol to intentionally filter out radar contacts derived from weather balloons due to the routine use of them (imagine the millions of tax payer dollars spent scrambling F-22’s for every meteorologist that deploys a weather balloon), the Chinese found a way around our ELINT defense and could have theoretically been sending balloons with impunity for years. But alas no more now.

As much as I vehemently oppose their actions and agenda, I gotta give props where props are due…
 
The Historical Fidelity said:
As much as I vehemently oppose their actions and agenda, I gotta give props where props are due…
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They just seem like such a low-tech solution that it's still a little hard for me to believe this wasn't the result of some budget or technical constraint.

Imagine if they hadn't gotten so "greedy" and made the payload so big. They could've used a much smaller balloon and we'd probably have never noticed it. This one was 200' tall!!
 
bit_user said:
They just seem like such a low-tech solution that it's still a little hard for me to believe this wasn't the result of some budget or technical constraint.

Imagine if they hadn't gotten so "greedy" and made the payload so big. They could've used a much smaller balloon and we'd probably have never noticed it. This one was 200' tall!!
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When you look at google maps, and zoom in to your house...that is NOT all by satellite.
At some point as you zoom in, google changes from sat images to aircraft images.
 
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BTW, in case you guys never heard about this, sending balloons across the Pacific is a tactic the Japanese also employed, during WWII. Fortunately, most of them never made it.
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When I first heard about the Chinese balloon, I half-thought that maybe they fully expected us to see it, and that it was intended to evoke traumatic memories of that dark episode in our history. I'm not sure if they're aware that it's not very well-known among the US public.
 
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USAFRet said:
When you look at google maps, and zoom in to your house...that is NOT all by satellite.
At some point as you zoom in, google changes from sat images to aircraft images.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I downloaded some areal orthophotos made available by my state's GIS department, back before Google bought Keyhole and turned it into Google Earth. For a long time, I was toying with the idea of making & hanging a huge, wall-sized printout of my city. I'd seen someone tile a wall with topographical maps and thought it'd be cool to do the same with orthophotos.

In fact, had Google Earth not come about, I was planning on writing my own 3D-accelerated app for interactively browsing the orthophotos. But, once I heard of Keyhole (because of the Google acquisition), I bought a subscription and spent an entire weekend doing what you'd probably now call "Google Earth tourism" with it. Looked at all my old homes & neighborhoods, plus every interesting site I could think of.
 
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bit_user said:
They just seem like such a low-tech solution that it's still a little hard for me to believe this wasn't the result of some budget or technical constraint.

Imagine if they hadn't gotten so "greedy" and made the payload so big. They could've used a much smaller balloon and we'd probably have never noticed it. This one was 200' tall!!
Click to expand...
“The best solutions are the simplest that can achieve the objective and no simpler” I forget who said a version of this but it is very true because “simple is good…simple is reliable…and if it does not work you can always hit him with it” -Boris the Blade AKA Boris the Bullet Dodger. (P.S. I changed heavy to simple) but it’s still a great quote.
 
bit_user said:
Yeah, I downloaded some areal orthophotos made available by my state's GIS department, back before Google bought Keyhole and turned it into Google Earth. For a long time, I was toying with the idea of making & hanging a huge, wall-sized printout of my city. I'd seen someone tile a wall with topographical maps and thought it'd be cool to do the same with orthophotos.

In fact, had Google Earth not come about, I was planning on writing my own 3D-accelerated app for interactively browsing the orthophotos. But, once I heard of Keyhole (because of the Google acquisition), I bought a subscription and spent an entire weekend doing what you'd probably now call "Google Earth tourism" with it. Looked at all my old homes & neighborhoods, plus every interesting site I could think of.
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I would have subscribed to your app my good man!
 
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dalek1234 said:
When China (or Russia, for that matter) says that something is so, in actuality, the exact opposite is true. I'm zero percent surprised that these turn out to be spy balloons because china denied that they were spy balloons.

China also said "why would we use spy balloons when we have satellites to do that". Sine the exact opposite of what China says is true, that means that they either have no spy satellites, or those satellites don't work well enough to be of use, hence the need for spy-balloons.
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The Jim Kramer of politics😆
 
The Historical Fidelity said:
I would have subscribed to your app my good man!
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When I was younger, I had this fantasy of having my own satellite and a wall-sized viewing screen.

...now that I say it, that does sound a bit voyeuristic, but I didn't intend to use it for spying on people.

Heh, I remember when Microsoft first launched TerraServer, back in the 90's. It was tile-based, but didn't have the best UI. Certainly not smooth-pan & scroll, like Google Maps. That was probably the genesis of my ideas. I started toying around with downloading tiles from it, but then I think they changed it in some way that made it harder for me to scrape.

It was actually after that, when I discovered my state's orthophoto archive. Not only was it freely available, but also higher-resolution.
 
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