U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

Won't work. The pressure differential would not be great enough to allow sufficient gases to escape to make a difference in altitude. These high-altitude balloons are very lightly pressurized.

now now - this is no time to introduce rational thought to how our wonderful government runs things.

Maybe because they didn't want it to "settle to earth"! They held up shooting it down until it was over water and could never be recovered!

My thoughts too. Also we would have seen if the payload was set to self destruct

Watching a sped-up replay of the ADS-B data (on another site) and it was interesting to watch as the TFR took effect and flights that normally cut the corner from near Wilmington, NC to Miami, started having to take the long way over land. Then by the time of the shoot down, how far in-land civilian traffic had been pushed. Better be safe than accidentally take down a civilian by mistake.

Now, hope we find some juicy information about the PLA's surveillance capabilities from what we salvage.

Did you ever think that we might have actually been gaining useful intelligence from the ballon? Learning what devices and methods they were using could help us. We also could have been providing them with false information or even jamming or confusing their onboard systems. I think China gained very little intelligence data sending this ballon over us and, from a world view, came off looking pretty stupid for launching it.

The Chinese have hundreds of satellites flying around all over the globe, recording images day and night.

This was nothing more than a stunt

See, there you go, your pride and sense of national security is nothing but hate speech...you need to be more Woke...

Four more to be an F-22 Ace!!!

He shouldn't have needed to give the order to shoot it down - and back in the cold war days - he wouldn't have. It would have been observed and reported on before it even made it to ADIZ, and once evaluated and determined to be both unmanned and unauthorized per protocol - it would have been taken out to land on some trees in alaska or canada. There were hundreds of opportunities to bring it down over areas that would not have had risk to people on the ground. We messed up, period. The president should have never entered into the equation - there have been procedures for this kind of thing for many decades.

The title was written about 5 days before your comment. As of now we know it as not being suspected.

They probably found out it was our own technology.

Which drone do you recommend, keeping in mind that it would have needed to move with precision at 66,000 feet and be able to grapple a payload with a physical size of 2 to 3 buses?

This balloon shoot-down could have been done with a precisely directed laser weapon, if such a thing existed. A clean laser shot through the balloon envelope would have done far less damage than a missile explosion, making it easier to recover and study the balloon’s payload.

I don't believe there are any US production drones that can fly anywhere near 60k feet. Also, anything with a wing would have to fly way too fast to maintain lift at that altitude. Probably the best vehicle to use for this purpose is another balloon. Or, as Peter Fuller suggests, a military-grade laser (but using laser weapons is not necessarily an escalation that we'd want to undertake). But engineering a solution from scratch to operationally functional is not something you can do in week. It's likely that with photo recon and SIGINT they already had a very good idea what was on the balloon. The best reason to shoot it down is that it was an egregious and reckless violation of US airspace, and for that an F-22 and missiles is just fine.

As an alternative, and this is just the hippie in me thinking, we could just have allowed the obvious Chinese provocation to occur and negotiated with China to even help them recover the craft (assuming that they have some way to recover it). The Chinese are very strategic, and we surely did exactly what they expected us to do. To treat them with sugar instead of vinegar would like have upset whatever strategic goals they were advancing.