Up, Up and Away in My Chinese Spy Balloon... And Crashing Down to Earth Way to Late.

 Ah, the saga of the spy balloon, that China say isn't a spy balloon, but most definitely is a spy balloon.

Apparently, the balloon is not a configuration that is a weather balloon. It has solar panels, which means it's designed to be in flight a lot longer than a weather balloon. It also has motors and propellers fitted, which means it has some station-keeping and manoeuvring capability, not a capability required by your average weather balloon. The give-away was China calling it a "Civilian Airship" 

The fact that another balloon is also over South America means that the releases were pretty deliberate.

The US said they had taken steps to mitigate any surveillance the Chinese could do. I take it that amounts to spreading out big white sheets over the snow-covered Montana silo sites. 

The real question is why are the Chinese using balloons, a relatively old and primitive technology to do surveillance? The answer may be in their past military space projects. They've already successfully trialled satellite-killing capability. If they went to war with America by Invading Taiwan, the Chinese would immediately deny space to the Americans (and the rest of the world) by killing a few Satellites and enveloping the Earth with debris. If it ever came to China invading Taiwan, if I were a Russian Cosmonaut on the ISS I'd be very worried as I don't really have a lifeboat at the moment.

A cascade of failures would occur and global surveillance from space would be stopped in it's tracks. 

Ah, you say... wouldn't satellites be needed to receive the signals from the balloon and send them back to China? Not necessarily: China could have a setup that used secure comms over the cellular network. Unless you're going to switch off the cellular network across North America including Canada, China could just do that. But then the U.S. could shoot the thing down immediately, rather than let it fly over some of the most sensitive sites in the country.

At which point, using the prevailing winds and balloons would give China an advantage. America would be using high altitude drones for their surveillance. The cost of losing and replacing a drone is a lot higher than a balloon with some scaffolding, solar panels and some clever tech attached.

Even killing the balloon isn't cheap. The US this weekend used an F-22 Raptor and an AIM-9X missile to shoot the balloon down. The AIM-9X on it's own accounted for close to half a million dollar's worth of exploding technology used to down something that probably cost a fraction of that.

You can begin to see why a balloon might not be technology of the past. 

Anyway, hopefully the U.S. fish the bits of Chinese kit out of the waters off Carolina and confirm what tech was actually fitted to the spy/not spy/spy balloon.

It's a shame they didn't go all James Bond-sy and have a group of jumpers ready to jump out of a high altitude aircraft and rendezvous with the falling lump of metal, attach a parachute to it and then pull the cord so it drifted down rather than slammed into the sea. 

Maybe next time. And no, I won't be doing it, I'm way too old for that shit.