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Sending a spy balloon over another country strikes me as really old technology.
The most plausible explanation for the 1947 Roswell “UFO crash” was that it wasn’t a weather balloon as the government claimed but a high-tech (for 1947) strategic spy balloon made by the US out of new alien-looking synthetic fabrics designed to float across the Soviet Union and take pictures to be recovered in the Pacific.
When I was a little kid in the 1960s, I knew engineers who’d helped design the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes for the CIA, so I’m not all that worked up over a 2023 Chinese balloon that drifts semi-randomly.
When I was 11 in 1970, the helicopter pilot who reported on freeway traffic jams for the local KGIL radio station my mother listened to was Francis Gary Powers, the U2 pilot who’d been shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, causing a giant international incident.
So, I’m having a hard time getting too steamed up.
Technical spying on the other guy has generally had a history of deflating apocalyptic worries about how he’s about to strike overwhelmingly at any moment so we’d better strike first. For example, U2 overflights of the Soviet Union in 1956-1960 brought back evidence that the Soviets were not imminently about to launch a nuclear first strike or send their tanks toward the Fulda Gap.
Later, my neighbor Jerry Pournelle, the future sci-fi novelist, spent a lot of time squinting at satellite photos of the Soviet Union for the Air Force and doing things like counting the number of wagon loads on farm roads being pulled by tractors rather than mules. He concluded the Soviet Union was poor, more or less “Bulgaria with nuclear missiles,” and that the rich and smart USA could outcompete them economically and technologically, an insight that had some influence on Reagan Administration strategy in the 1980s.
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I thought the Roswell balloon was designed with special microphones to pick up vibrations in the upper atmosphere — above New Mexico — coming from Soviet nuclear bomb tests. It wasn’t supposed to drift all the way to Russia.
It was secret because of the method and the fact that “our” side could thus monitor the bomb tests, and thus the allowance of freaky UFO imaginations…
Wut?That bit, alone, is enough to make me think, damn, maybe it WASN'T just a secret spy balloon, cuz that "crash test" cover story for bodies is ridiculous to the point that it's insulting to my intelligence.Also, moon landing. The notion that it was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick is guffaw-inducing... until you compare to the guffaw-induction by NASA's claim that the reason they can't release the telemetry tapes is cuz budget cuts caused engineers to tape over them. Again, wut? That hooey is enough to force critical thinkers to consider, kicking and screaming, maybe the moon hoax lunacy is true after all. Because the infinitely greater lunacy is to expect us to believe that historically priceless, irreplaceable recordings of the Greatest Achievement Ever in the History of Mankind, got treated like a bunch of old junk $1 cassette tapes of Top 40 songs off the radio. So, THAT didn't happen. So where ARE those telemetry tapes? Well, maybe they never existed.Replies: @Curle
I think you mean to say that you are not going to blow it out of proportion.
The Chinese stole America’s innocence with that over flight. I will never forgive them for that.
Don’t we have fighter balloons we can send to shoot it down? I sense a strategic Balloon Gap that will require a few billion $ to close.
General "Buck" Turgidson
https://youtu.be/4YJLirkiskg?t=249
Okay, I can’t help it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY
https://img.libquotes.com/pic-quotes/v1/molly-ivins-quote-lbq2c5i.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Buzz Mohawk, @Greta Handel
This story has left me totally confused: what possible value could there be to a “spy balloon”?
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
@stevesailer
Apparently if this (year old) thread is to be believed — these spy balloons can be pretty useful even today.
Especially if they can be taught to “navigate” high altitude winds via ML/AI.
The US government has its own balloons, two or three of which are always on station monitoring the country.
They finally shot down the Chicom balloon in a meaningless kabuki theater gesture:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/suspected-chinese-spy-balloon-spotted-over-north-carolina-us-might-shoot-it-down-over
Beijing probably gave Austin the go ahead after verifying the data on the balloon had been transmitted back to the motherland via satellite relay.Replies: @Ben Kurtz
When did balloons become scary? They always used to be nice. We even had songs about them:
“Up, up and away-ay, in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…” Times have changed.
https://i.redd.it/0ye6gris6yd11.jpg
Hashed our mellow for balloons.Replies: @Prof. Woland, @G. Poulin
For quite a long time, NASA has been one of the largest users of helium in the world … here a recent big helium contract
https://www.gasworld.com/story/air-products-inks-potential-1bn-helium-deal-with-nasa/
The flat-earthers out there say that all those ‘satellites’ are really held up by balloons … which is why NASA has been using all that helium for decades. Just sayin’ …
Here’s a domestic USA ‘balloon crash’ of one supposedly sent-up by Google, with satellite-type gear that looks like the Chinese payload that was flying over America
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730011150/downloads/19730011150.pdf
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/LM04_Lunar_Module_ppLV1-17.pdf
Apparently if this (year old) thread is to be believed — these spy balloons can be pretty useful even today.
Especially if they can be taught to “navigate” high altitude winds via ML/AI.
https://twitter.com/TheKimulation/status/1544527308282896385?s=20&t=GNlvaF3WSuIm7ddG1m23cAReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard
Yes.
The US government has its own balloons, two or three of which are always on station monitoring the country.
They finally shot down the Chicom balloon in a meaningless kabuki theater gesture:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/suspected-chinese-spy-balloon-spotted-over-north-carolina-us-might-shoot-it-down-over
Beijing probably gave Austin the go ahead after verifying the data on the balloon had been transmitted back to the motherland via satellite relay.
In the context of formidable, terrifying military weapons, a balloon sends a lighthearted message. Unfortunately, the reaction of the US military and mainstream media is to deem this a major provocation and signal of menace.
This reminds me of when China built those gigantic Coast Guard Cutters (12,000 tons, the size of a destroyer!). These are not warships. These are good for ramming and “shouldering.” The worst-case scenario is the exchange of small-arms fire – – as opposed to World War III. The U.S. reaction to what I will call “let’s play at bumper boats” was to send a carrier group. It appears that the US has hold of the wrong end of the stick (if anyone still uses that expression).
“When I was a little kid in the 1960s, I knew engineers who’d helped design the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes for the CIA, so I’m not all that worked up over a 2023 Chinese balloon that drifts semi-randomly.”
With all due respect, I think you are missing the point. That Chinese spy balloon (if that is what it is) was not sent to collect information but to convey it. We now know–the whole world now knows–that the Chinese, unprovoked, can invade American air space for six days with impunity and only incur the weakest response from the American government on the seventh day.
According to my Chinese friend, the Biden administration had already made America a laughingstock to the Chinese–I don’t mean among highly places government officials, just ordinary, educated Chinese citizens. Now it’s official and global. The senile perv and his dress-wearing degenerates cannot now be seen as other than weak and ineffectual.
Can't do something that hard without using the global supply chain for all the wafer fab equipment (WEF) and specialty chemicals countries that for example Japan, the Netherlands and the US supply. Companies in those three make almost all the WEF, and Japan is a major source for chemicals, something they've been using for leverage against South Korea's relitigation of pre-end of WWII colonization. There's no chance the PRC can do it all on their own, and I continue to point to the example of their inability to make jet engines that are as good as Russian ones, which aren't as good as Western ones.
We've read the PRC has been doing balloon surveillance for several years. Probably means something they're now doing it overtly over the continental US, unless there were simply no winds at any high altitude that would keep it over Canada and they'd predicted otherwise.
Although one wonders about self-destruct capabilities, the potential of which might be one reason people were adverse to shooting it down over land. Meanwhile, we should assume they got good photos of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana which has a third of our operational ICBM siloes, and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri which is home to our current stealth bombers.
The USA is a vast country, the idea that no foreign balloon is allowed over this huge territory is funny. Also it was a good idea of the Biden administration to avoid any danger to US civilians. Imagine it would have destroyed some property of an US citizen and they would have tried to get compensation from PRC - all very troublesome.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @YetAnotherAnon, @Kylie
1) The Chinese are f**king with us. Successfully. They’ve shown the world our leaders are pansies. Biden was told about the balloon 1/28, a week ago! DJT would have blown it out of the sky at once.
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.
They've shown the world they can humiliate America because they control the US government and military.
There is no doubt that Beijing authorized Austin to shoot the balloon down after they had downloaded the data from it via satellite relay.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
The Chinese don't need balloon pics of American terrain. They aren't going to launch an invasion of North America or get into a nuclear war with us.
However, this does proof the awesome capabilities of the F-22. It went up against a balloon and actually won.Replies: @J.Ross, @Jamsportle
Maybe China has its own MIC, and a senior vice president somewhere had an idea.
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
” You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet” Can a balloon loiter? Doesn’t just go where ever the wind blows it, even if that is somewhere that isn’t interesting. I also think balloon pics might be tuff as the balloon will be bouncing around up there.
2nd the photographic array is suspended well below the balloon and would not be bouncing around. I'm sure that it is well stabilized.
There is a lot we don't know about how these things work but hopefully they will be able to recover a lot of the wreckage and gain a better understanding of how these things phone home, the sensors on board, etc. It's true that satellites can already take razor sharp photos but this airship might have other capabilities outside the visible spectrum.Replies: @annonymous, @Muggles, @David Davenport
I suspect the ChiComms were interested in Elint (radars, etc.) as well as Imint.
But their main point was to test us, and they succeeded in making the USA a world wide laughing stock.
I am not a huge fan of DJT, but this s**t would not have happened if he were still in office. The balloon would have been shot down in Alaska.
Yep, I’m going to agree with this explanation. What batter way to make asses out of the U.S. military-industrial-complex than by lazily floating a balloon over the country and then watching everyone reee over it and be afraid to shoot it down?
From what I have read the balloon flew over the Aleutians and then Alaska before entering the airspace over the continental U.S. If the Pentagon was serious about air defense instead of putting trannies in the Marine Corps they would have shot it down over some remote Aleutian Island.
They didn’t.
Off-topic
As a lad, I loved Thoreau’s Walden, but later much less loved the man upon learning that his wilderness cabin on the pond was a mile and half from downtown and 200 feet from the shore, that he returned to live in his mother’s boarding house, never married, and other than Walden was a bungler at life. I never looked at Ralph Waldo Emerson because I thought he would be as mushy and unmanly as his protege. I was mistaken.
Emerson, Self-Reliance
As for Thoreau, I'd be more charitable. Few lives can withstand scrutiny.
Seven years later, his KNBC4 newscopter ran out of fuel, killing him and the cameraman upon landing.
What better way to destroy ICBMs in their boost phase than to have an armed balloon hovering over the launch sites. Maybe not this one or the next one or the one after. Lull the target into indifference. Oh, just another stray weather balloon. But when you are ready to make your preemptive strike….
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
..I wonder if realtime images where relayed to a satellite ……which would mean it was shot down after completing it’s mission. …
..maybe he thought it was going to drop him a bundle of cash.
Sorry, OT, but I seriously want to know: Steve Sailer, do you ever check out the front page of this website?
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?
"Jung-Freud" has no business being a writer. He has occasional insights but he's way too repetitive and prolix. He needs to learn how to write, or hire an editor.Replies: @HammerJack
High altitude balloons can carry mirrors to relay directed energy weapons. Go ahead and laff, but we have been experimenting with this technology for a couple decades now.
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
It’s worse than that.
They’ve shown the world they can humiliate America because they control the US government and military.
There is no doubt that Beijing authorized Austin to shoot the balloon down after they had downloaded the data from it via satellite relay.
Someone brought up the idea, not sure if the timing works, this is a reply to our setting up bases in the Philippines. OK, I suppose you could claim they're just for show, but they make Xi lose face. I also doubt the US Deep State stays bought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDcReplies: @MEH 0910
NENA | 99 Luftballons [1983] [Offizielles HD Musikvideo]
Was there a point? I like how you connect different things, love your quiz show wide knowledge, but this post never delivered a result.
P.s. And you forgot to mix in the Dean drive. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive
P.s.s. That’s my fourth comment today. How come I didn’t get rejected? Have the rules changed?
It was secret because of the method and the fact that "our" side could thus monitor the bomb tests, and thus the allowance of freaky UFO imaginations...Replies: @jsm, @Joe Stalin, @Eagle Eye
Ok, sure, fine.
Except for the idiotic cover story released, that the ostensible alien bodies recovered were crash test dummies.
Wut?
That bit, alone, is enough to make me think, damn, maybe it WASN’T just a secret spy balloon, cuz that “crash test” cover story for bodies is ridiculous to the point that it’s insulting to my intelligence.
Also, moon landing. The notion that it was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick is guffaw-inducing… until you compare to the guffaw-induction by NASA’s claim that the reason they can’t release the telemetry tapes is cuz budget cuts caused engineers to tape over them.
Again, wut? That hooey is enough to force critical thinkers to consider, kicking and screaming, maybe the moon hoax lunacy is true after all. Because the infinitely greater lunacy is to expect us to believe that historically priceless, irreplaceable recordings of the Greatest Achievement Ever in the History of Mankind, got treated like a bunch of old junk $1 cassette tapes of Top 40 songs off the radio. So, THAT didn’t happen. So where ARE those telemetry tapes? Well, maybe they never existed.
Not in government. While the boss is busy keeping up on his Equity/Diversity training some clerk about seven floors down in the building realizes she can avoid a boring and laborious cataloging task by simply recycling some dusty old tapes.Replies: @jsm
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast, @Greta Handel, @Anonymous, @Dumbo
Sorry, OT, but I seriously want to know: What makes you think Sailer is a figure of any greater significance than the other two?
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast, @Greta Handel, @Anonymous, @Dumbo
I mean, the minute you move to substack is the minute I start kicking in some more bucks.
I can’t get excited about it either.
But somehow the “Biden” administration managed the worst of all the alternatives–
–make deal out of it
— but do nothing with all sorts of lame, whimpy “grandma could get hurt” excuses
— let it complete its mission, crossing the US
— then shoot it down–stopping coastal Carolina air traffic to do it.
If possible, shooting it with something low energy, low tech, that let it slowly deflate and sink, then packing up the wreckage and sending it back to China with a “we think this is yours” note.
Alternatively good a simple: “If there’s stuff you’re concerned about and want to go see, just ask. We’ll be happy to have your guys come over and take a look, while our guys check out your facilities.”
It appears that (1) the balloon was only shot down once it was over the Atlantic, and (2) a missile was wasted in the effort. By the merest coincidence, both factors ensure that the payload is now unavailable for analysis.Replies: @Jack D
https://youtu.be/-XPnFRasAJQ
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast, @Greta Handel, @Anonymous, @Dumbo
The Jews get two mentions in Anglin’s article about the Chinese balloon. I don’t think Anglin could write the owner’s manual for a coffee machine without mentioning the Jews at least twice. The guy’s a self-parody at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY
https://img.libquotes.com/pic-quotes/v1/molly-ivins-quote-lbq2c5i.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Buzz Mohawk, @Greta Handel
Not properly related but one of the best TV shows to come out in recent years is Deutschland83, which uses that and the plagiarized but different Major Tom as its theme music. Fantastic show. If you must pander to Chinese audiences, do it like D83 and not like Sylvester Stallone’s The Has-Beens.
It was secret because of the method and the fact that "our" side could thus monitor the bomb tests, and thus the allowance of freaky UFO imaginations...Replies: @jsm, @Joe Stalin, @Eagle Eye
Microphones? They could detect nuclear weapons by monitoring VLF radio transmissions.
“Mr. President we must not allow a balloon 🎈 gap!”
General “Buck” Turgidson
Well, they were trying to keep the cover story going a while longer, but the cat’s out of the bag now. You’ve stumbled on to the real reason for the multi-billion dollar Pfizer vaccine development program.
The balloon is obviously not for spying. The Chinese can collect all the data they want via other methods.
It was secret because of the method and the fact that "our" side could thus monitor the bomb tests, and thus the allowance of freaky UFO imaginations...Replies: @jsm, @Joe Stalin, @Eagle Eye
From memory, there were indeed programs using balloons to monitor sounds high in the atmosphere for the purpose of detecting Soviet nuclear tests.
It was discovered that temperature gradients in the atmospheric at high altitudes sometimes create a conduit layer. The upper and lower boundaries of the layer refract sound waves back into the conduit layer. As a result, sound energy does not spread out vertically, only horizontally, and thus decreases with the simple distance from the event (explosion), rather than with the square of the distance from the event as in normal atmospheric condition. Using atmospheric conduit effects, sound signals can be detected over much longer distances than would be possible based on regular atmospheric sound propagation.
The same sound conduit phenomenon can occur in the deep sea and enables whales to communicate across the Atlantic. Sounds arising outside a conduit layer may also undergo deflection which could be used e.g. to hide the sound of submarines in certain constellations.
From what I understood, the ‘spy balloon’ wasn’t meant to do anything tactically, it was simply meant as a diplomatic insult– a middle finger of sorts, in retaliation to the US significantly expanding it’s military footprint in the Philippines.
A way to get the US to cancel its impending visit to China by Sec. of State.
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast, @Greta Handel, @Anonymous, @Dumbo
Are you kidding? He and most of his contributor$ are afraid to look outside this little HBD tree fort.
"Up, up and away-ay, in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon..." Times have changed.Replies: @mmack
I blame Der Germans und der Dread Zeppelin:
Hashed our mellow for balloons.
But somehow the "Biden" administration managed the worst of all the alternatives--
--make deal out of it
-- but do nothing with all sorts of lame, whimpy "grandma could get hurt" excuses
-- let it complete its mission, crossing the US
-- then shoot it down--stopping coastal Carolina air traffic to do it.
If possible, shooting it with something low energy, low tech, that let it slowly deflate and sink, then packing up the wreckage and sending it back to China with a "we think this is yours" note.
Alternatively good a simple: "If there's stuff you're concerned about and want to go see, just ask. We'll be happy to have your guys come over and take a look, while our guys check out your facilities."Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Eagle Eye, @S
Options are pretty much limited to getting within gun range, which is iffy given its height and how less well a fighter can maneuver as the air gets really thin I think, or what they did, use an advanced Sidewinder from a F-22 that got up to 58K feet.
For a long time their sensors have been able to pick up the heated leading edges of other fighters, a much more subtle signal than the tailpipe of a jet engine. Perhaps the only type of sensor that would work against such a target; if not, cheaper than an AMRAAM and a passive sensor.
But somehow the "Biden" administration managed the worst of all the alternatives--
--make deal out of it
-- but do nothing with all sorts of lame, whimpy "grandma could get hurt" excuses
-- let it complete its mission, crossing the US
-- then shoot it down--stopping coastal Carolina air traffic to do it.
If possible, shooting it with something low energy, low tech, that let it slowly deflate and sink, then packing up the wreckage and sending it back to China with a "we think this is yours" note.
Alternatively good a simple: "If there's stuff you're concerned about and want to go see, just ask. We'll be happy to have your guys come over and take a look, while our guys check out your facilities."Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Eagle Eye, @S
The F-22 has a published “service ceiling” 65,000 ft and can reach far higher momentarily with some trickery. The balloon, apparently drifting at about 66,000 ft, appears to have a diameter of about 100 ft and is, of course, stationary relative to the surrounding air. The balloon could easily have been punctured with one or two well-placed bullets, like hitting the proverbial barn door.
It appears that (1) the balloon was only shot down once it was over the Atlantic, and (2) a missile was wasted in the effort. By the merest coincidence, both factors ensure that the payload is now unavailable for analysis.
One or two bullets would have done nothing to a giant balloon - it's like having a nail in a tire - it can take days for the air to leak out. A rogue weather balloon took 1,000 shots in 1998 and it did not come down:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10td3dh/til_in_1998_american_british_and_canadian_air/
A balloon like like this is not like a birthday balloon that just pops. The helium is at very low pressure at that altitude.
The only way to bring it down was to rip the envelope to shreds. The cost of the missile is trivial in relation to the national security importance.
I am just amazed at the level of distrust people have in the DoD. They don't always make the best decisions but they are not on the payroll of the Chinese.Replies: @Curle, @Eagle Eye, @anon
But somehow the "Biden" administration managed the worst of all the alternatives--
--make deal out of it
-- but do nothing with all sorts of lame, whimpy "grandma could get hurt" excuses
-- let it complete its mission, crossing the US
-- then shoot it down--stopping coastal Carolina air traffic to do it.
If possible, shooting it with something low energy, low tech, that let it slowly deflate and sink, then packing up the wreckage and sending it back to China with a "we think this is yours" note.
Alternatively good a simple: "If there's stuff you're concerned about and want to go see, just ask. We'll be happy to have your guys come over and take a look, while our guys check out your facilities."Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Eagle Eye, @S
Aleutian based US fighters were routinely shooting down the Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs in the Spring of 1945. They are still finding remains of some of the 9000 balloons which were launched from Japan in North America, including live explosives as late as 2014.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
With all due respect, I think you are missing the point. That Chinese spy balloon (if that is what it is) was not sent to collect information but to convey it. We now know--the whole world now knows--that the Chinese, unprovoked, can invade American air space for six days with impunity and only incur the weakest response from the American government on the seventh day.
According to my Chinese friend, the Biden administration had already made America a laughingstock to the Chinese--I don't mean among highly places government officials, just ordinary, educated Chinese citizens. Now it's official and global. The senile perv and his dress-wearing degenerates cannot now be seen as other than weak and ineffectual.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Erik Sieven
Can well believe that … except the higher ups who grasp how “Biden” has terminated their advanced chip making capabilities with extreme prejudice are not laughing, are reported to have given up on this major (Xi) initiative.
Can’t do something that hard without using the global supply chain for all the wafer fab equipment (WEF) and specialty chemicals countries that for example Japan, the Netherlands and the US supply. Companies in those three make almost all the WEF, and Japan is a major source for chemicals, something they’ve been using for leverage against South Korea’s relitigation of pre-end of WWII colonization. There’s no chance the PRC can do it all on their own, and I continue to point to the example of their inability to make jet engines that are as good as Russian ones, which aren’t as good as Western ones.
We’ve read the PRC has been doing balloon surveillance for several years. Probably means something they’re now doing it overtly over the continental US, unless there were simply no winds at any high altitude that would keep it over Canada and they’d predicted otherwise.
Although one wonders about self-destruct capabilities, the potential of which might be one reason people were adverse to shooting it down over land. Meanwhile, we should assume they got good photos of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana which has a third of our operational ICBM siloes, and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri which is home to our current stealth bombers.
Is this even an unusual occurance? How often do weather balloons go astray?
After 9/11, I read a couple of excited articles about small planes crashing with NO-ONE aboard! Turns out this was a regular occurance. Many small planes are aerodynamic enough that, if you are working on one, and forget to properly chock the wheels, it can take off on it’s own, and fly in a straight line until it runs out of gas.
Is this also a common occurance, and TPTB want to get us all excited about evil Chinamen?
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008754750/chinese-spy-balloon-montana.htmlReplies: @tyrone
Spy balloon = snoopy ball.
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast, @Greta Handel, @Anonymous, @Dumbo
It’s Anglin and co. who should be trying to distance themselves from someone as toxic as Sailer.
I’m soooo relieved that you’re not worried.
First, no. You may not know it, but despite the people you knew when you were a widdle bitty baby boy (imagine all the prostitutes who knew the same people) but the generally accepted explanation for people who aren’t Giorgio Tsoukalos is that it was a balloon that landed in Roswell and it was part of Project Mogul, which didn’t involve going anywhere near Russia, just to the upper atmosphere to collect samples which would enable detection of nuclear tests.
: You can’t leave stealth bombers out in the rain, so they’d be inside hangars.
[325]: In what universe do you think that looks even vaguely similar?
As a lad, I loved Thoreau’s Walden, but later much less loved the man upon learning that his wilderness cabin on the pond was a mile and half from downtown and 200 feet from the shore, that he returned to live in his mother’s boarding house, never married, and other than Walden was a bungler at life. I never looked at Ralph Waldo Emerson because I thought he would be as mushy and unmanly as his protege. I was mistaken.
Emerson, Self-RelianceReplies: @bomag
Thanks for the Emerson quote.
As for Thoreau, I’d be more charitable. Few lives can withstand scrutiny.
The low IQ conservative propaganda complex is pushing “Democrats didn’t want to shoot down the Chinese balloon because they hate America” type garbage. Conservatives and the GOP are not going to capitalize on the unpopularity of liberals and Democrats because no one can stand how bad and intentionally stupid GOP propaganda is. The GOP and it’s media propaganda arm will continue to push stupid narratives about fake “scandals” like Benghazi in order to avoid taking populist positions on the real issues. This strategy is increasingly failing to attract voters and something has to give.
What are the real issues? Please describe the populist positions you'd like the Republicans to take on the real issues.
Charles B. Moore, a professor of atmospheric physics in New Mexico, was involved in the program that launched balloons from Alamogordo, and he contributed a couple of data-packed chapters to the book UFO crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth (1997, Saler, Ziegler, and Moore; Smithsonian Institution Press). The Roswell balloon was NYU flight #4, a weather radar target balloon. Moore only heard about the Roswell UFO myth decades after the program and interacted with many of the conspiracy nuts. He knew their theories inside out and took care to preserve data about the program and each flight. He has answers to all their claims that refute how a five pound pile of mylar, balsa wood, and pink plastic tape with a flower pattern was supposedly an alien craft made of weird high-tech shape-shifting metal (remember, the most advanced material known by people in remote New Mexico ranches in 1947 was the pre-plastic bakelite used to make telephones–modern potato chip bags would have freaked then out).
The balloon carried no cameras, nor was it part of an upper-atmosphere air collection program to detect USSR H-bomb tests. These existed, but were other programs.
The book UFO crash at Roswell also included chapters by two anthropology professors who analyze Roswell as an example of how a folk narrative develops. They use a technique that I have used ever since I read their book: Nail down a timeline, what claims were made when. You can see the story be created before your eyes when you do this. Pre-internet it was easier to do this because you had discrete media reports and books that had dates on them. In the internet age it’s harder to figure out what was claimed when. But timelining can be used in other ways. The local newspaper where Brionna Taylor lived made an timeline of everything claimed by the police in their reports and by the attorneys facing off against the police, and it really cleared things up (it also ended up being memory holed later). Just getting a timeline of what everybody claimed happened when is the best place to start in figuring out a controversy.
https://books.google.co.jp/books/about/UFO_CRASH_AT_ROSWELL.html?id=ZTnXAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
The memes are especially clever for this Chinese Balloon event. I was going to post one or two but there are so many clever ones.
1. old-school technology can work really well even in the modern age E.g. short-wave radio (e.g. google “The Queen of Cuba spy” to demonstrate how effective it can be); revolver pistols (more than 150 years old and still as reliable and effective as semi-automatic pistols), dogs v. electronic alarms (yappy dogs will almost always alert you before your alarm system does, and they keep you warm at night). Big deal about the U-2 if a simple balloon can get you the same info for 1/100000 of the cost.
2. Old-school technology can, ahem, “fly under the radar”, as tech-heavy opponents can overlook it as not worth protecting against. See: this incident right here.
3. Biden’s handers, once again, showed weakness in the face of a genuine threat, doing nothing more than harrumphing and not even making a show of shooting it down. Remember the Afghanistan pull out ?
Or here’s something close to home: One memory-holed major incident was in 2021 when the southern gas pipeline got hacked by hackers demanding ransom, causing a panic shortage of gas in the south (remember the asian lady with the plastic bags of gasoline?), and Biden’s handlers merely had the companies pay the ransom and never caught them. The feds literally rolled over for hackers still on the run.
Biden’s regime is weak, weak, weak, and appears weak, weak, weak. Perception is truth in politics, and Biden’s handlers just added to the perception again.
The idea that Benghazi was a “fake scandal” is so laughable that you’ve outed yourself as a Deep State hack, son.
The GOP created a fake scandal to cover up the real scandal and conservative masses fell for it like the braindead morons they are.
Many years ago, when I started reading this blog, the alternative right attracted critically minded people who didn't fall for low-IQ GOP talking media points. Now, most of the people around the new "dissident right" are the same retards who fall for every GOP media op. The GOP is reorienting to goofy, untrue conspiracy theories as a way to bait voters away from populism and nationalism.
He attracts exalted readers and commenters such as… you?
The Chinese (correctly) called this an airship and not a balloon. It has considerable ability to maneuver in two different ways – first it has propellers that are driven by large solar arrays and second it has the ability to ascend and descend in order to catch wind currents that are known to be going in certain directions at certain altitudes.
2nd the photographic array is suspended well below the balloon and would not be bouncing around. I’m sure that it is well stabilized.
There is a lot we don’t know about how these things work but hopefully they will be able to recover a lot of the wreckage and gain a better understanding of how these things phone home, the sensors on board, etc. It’s true that satellites can already take razor sharp photos but this airship might have other capabilities outside the visible spectrum.
No propellers and no dangling photographic array.
Have the Chinese also invented invisibility cloaking? If so, why waste that on some silly balloon overflight?
If you have seen such a photo documenting your claims, please share.Replies: @Jack D
What's your source for that?Replies: @Jack D
After 9/11, I read a couple of excited articles about small planes crashing with NO-ONE aboard! Turns out this was a regular occurance. Many small planes are aerodynamic enough that, if you are working on one, and forget to properly chock the wheels, it can take off on it's own, and fly in a straight line until it runs out of gas.
Is this also a common occurance, and TPTB want to get us all excited about evil Chinamen?Replies: @Jack D
It’s not a weather balloon and in fact the Administration didn’t want to tell us at all because they are pussies and didn’t want to mess up Blinken’s trip. But once they had to call a ground stop at Billings Airport and once civilians started filming it, they had no choice but to react.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008754750/chinese-spy-balloon-montana.html
They've shown the world they can humiliate America because they control the US government and military.
There is no doubt that Beijing authorized Austin to shoot the balloon down after they had downloaded the data from it via satellite relay.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
If true, the Deep State is really factionalized seeing as how other parts of it are dismantling the PRCs high end chip manufacturing with a rusty knife as I detailed elsewhere, and I would add inflicting for a long time concentrated damage on specific companies like Huawei.
Someone brought up the idea, not sure if the timing works, this is a reply to our setting up bases in the Philippines. OK, I suppose you could claim they’re just for show, but they make Xi lose face. I also doubt the US Deep State stays bought.
They've shown the world they can humiliate America because they control the US government and military.
There is no doubt that Beijing authorized Austin to shoot the balloon down after they had downloaded the data from it via satellite relay.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
Really? No doubt? Wow, and you know this with great certainty how?
If the US president were a Chinese agent, can someone tell me how he would have acted any different than Joe Biden?
2nd the photographic array is suspended well below the balloon and would not be bouncing around. I'm sure that it is well stabilized.
There is a lot we don't know about how these things work but hopefully they will be able to recover a lot of the wreckage and gain a better understanding of how these things phone home, the sensors on board, etc. It's true that satellites can already take razor sharp photos but this airship might have other capabilities outside the visible spectrum.Replies: @annonymous, @Muggles, @David Davenport
would it not then have made much more sense to shoot it down over land than sea, to facilitate debris recovery?
It appears that (1) the balloon was only shot down once it was over the Atlantic, and (2) a missile was wasted in the effort. By the merest coincidence, both factors ensure that the payload is now unavailable for analysis.Replies: @Jack D
Wrong and wrong. The payload fell in shallow water and they are going to recover most of it – probably more than they would get on land. The missile ruptured the envelope but the payload appears to have come down intact. The ruptured envelope probably acted as a parachute and slowed the descent.
One or two bullets would have done nothing to a giant balloon – it’s like having a nail in a tire – it can take days for the air to leak out. A rogue weather balloon took 1,000 shots in 1998 and it did not come down:
A balloon like like this is not like a birthday balloon that just pops. The helium is at very low pressure at that altitude.
The only way to bring it down was to rip the envelope to shreds. The cost of the missile is trivial in relation to the national security importance.
I am just amazed at the level of distrust people have in the DoD. They don’t always make the best decisions but they are not on the payroll of the Chinese.
That’s the job of the White House, Congress and the CIA.
Could get messy with civilians getting to much of it first.
https://i.redd.it/0ye6gris6yd11.jpg
Hashed our mellow for balloons.Replies: @Prof. Woland, @G. Poulin
My late mother saw the Hindenburg about 20 minutes before it blew up. Lakehurst NJ was about 10 miles inland from where my grandfather owned a beach house. All the kids waved to it before it turned inland.
She also lived there during WW2. There was all kinds of flotsam and jetsam periodically from ships that had been torpedoed. One of her junior high school friends saw a dog walking up the beach with a human hand in its mouth. They were under blackout and any one with a German accent was removed and put in camps for safekeeping.
Wut?That bit, alone, is enough to make me think, damn, maybe it WASN'T just a secret spy balloon, cuz that "crash test" cover story for bodies is ridiculous to the point that it's insulting to my intelligence.Also, moon landing. The notion that it was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick is guffaw-inducing... until you compare to the guffaw-induction by NASA's claim that the reason they can't release the telemetry tapes is cuz budget cuts caused engineers to tape over them. Again, wut? That hooey is enough to force critical thinkers to consider, kicking and screaming, maybe the moon hoax lunacy is true after all. Because the infinitely greater lunacy is to expect us to believe that historically priceless, irreplaceable recordings of the Greatest Achievement Ever in the History of Mankind, got treated like a bunch of old junk $1 cassette tapes of Top 40 songs off the radio. So, THAT didn't happen. So where ARE those telemetry tapes? Well, maybe they never existed.Replies: @Curle
“Because the infinitely greater lunacy is to expect us to believe that historically priceless, irreplaceable recordings of the Greatest Achievement Ever in the History of Mankind, got treated like a bunch of old junk $1 cassette tapes of Top 40 songs off the radio.”
Not in government. While the boss is busy keeping up on his Equity/Diversity training some clerk about seven floors down in the building realizes she can avoid a boring and laborious cataloging task by simply recycling some dusty old tapes.
'cept for the inconvenient fact, in this case, that the tapes were ostensibly reused in the '80s before DIE really got going good.
QUOTE And then on May 7, 1981, Code 863.1 reported that it needed to procure 164,220 reels
of magnetic tape required by the Network Logistics Depot, the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, and three other NASA centers over an eight-month period. Sitting in the
library that day, Nafzger could only think, "Wow, it looks like there's a rational
connection between the pull out of tapes and the shortage of one-inch magnetic tapes. I
didn't find a smoking gun and they didn't reference the WNRC in name, but they did
reference the need for tapes."
The day Neil Armstrong and Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walked on moon, the tracking
stations faithfully recorded the event. Nafzger figures that each of the three stations
used 15 one-inch tape reels to record the actual event, meaning that Goddard received
a total of 45 tapes documenting the history-making occasion. Because the WNRC no
longer stored the Apollo-era tapes, Nafzger could draw only one conclusion based on
what he read in the weeklies: The 45 Apollo 11 tapes were degaussed, recertified, and
reused to satisfy a NASA-wide shortage of one-inch tapes more than a decade later. UNQUOTE
So NASA claims they think it was in the '80s that the tapes got taped over, and this discovery was only made when Moon Hoax Theorists demanded a FOIA release of the telemetry tapes. "Oh oopsie, you want those tapes, ha ha we recorded over them later on. Sorry about that." Suuuurrrre you did.
One or two bullets would have done nothing to a giant balloon - it's like having a nail in a tire - it can take days for the air to leak out. A rogue weather balloon took 1,000 shots in 1998 and it did not come down:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10td3dh/til_in_1998_american_british_and_canadian_air/
A balloon like like this is not like a birthday balloon that just pops. The helium is at very low pressure at that altitude.
The only way to bring it down was to rip the envelope to shreds. The cost of the missile is trivial in relation to the national security importance.
I am just amazed at the level of distrust people have in the DoD. They don't always make the best decisions but they are not on the payroll of the Chinese.Replies: @Curle, @Eagle Eye, @anon
“I am just amazed at the level of distrust people have in the DoD. They don’t always make the best decisions but they are not on the payroll of the Chinese.”
That’s the job of the White House, Congress and the CIA.
What bothered me most is watching the reaction of Marjorie Taylor Greene. No Republican in Congress is more intensely targeted by the Jewish media and power structure. Instead of talking about Israel, the Jewish Lobby, the events in Iran last week that we are on the hook for, she finds another foreign policy distraction. This is not how America First should be defined.
Timeline dominated by the balloon: https://twitter.com/RepMTG
will there be a sequel?
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
There’s something fake about this story. My guess is this is a way for the Biden Administration to look tough and for our Transgender Pentagon to flex. Make a big deal out of some errant weather balloon.
The Chinese don’t need balloon pics of American terrain. They aren’t going to launch an invasion of North America or get into a nuclear war with us.
However, this does proof the awesome capabilities of the F-22. It went up against a balloon and actually won.
Mishandled documents.
Revelation that yes Hunter is being investigated.
Russia starts to mess up the Plan in Ukraine.
The Pentagon confirms that yes there are bioweapons labs there.
The government: "It is balloon!"
How much did a SPAD cost?
-Discard
With all due respect, I think you are missing the point. That Chinese spy balloon (if that is what it is) was not sent to collect information but to convey it. We now know--the whole world now knows--that the Chinese, unprovoked, can invade American air space for six days with impunity and only incur the weakest response from the American government on the seventh day.
According to my Chinese friend, the Biden administration had already made America a laughingstock to the Chinese--I don't mean among highly places government officials, just ordinary, educated Chinese citizens. Now it's official and global. The senile perv and his dress-wearing degenerates cannot now be seen as other than weak and ineffectual.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Erik Sieven
I think this is strange point of view. Everybody knows that at every given time numerous spying activities by several foreign countries is going on in the USA – the same at it is in many other countries. And of course the country which spies the most internationally it the USA itself, including in allied countries.
The USA is a vast country, the idea that no foreign balloon is allowed over this huge territory is funny. Also it was a good idea of the Biden administration to avoid any danger to US civilians. Imagine it would have destroyed some property of an US citizen and they would have tried to get compensation from PRC – all very troublesome.
gaining atmospheric data.
Set them each free twice a day,
so set your clock to Zulu time.The President is on the line,
obliviously hung out to dry.
His mind is a low-pressure center,
as zwei und neunzig luft balloons go by.(Gonna work on the lyrics for a blog post Monday.)Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
In the UK a lot of fairs and village fetes feature the release of helium balloons bearing cards, asking the finder to post them back - the idea being that the card returned from the greatest distance inside say a year is the winner.
Having prevailing Westerlies the winning card is usually returned from the European mainland. I had no idea this was potentially an act of aggression that could trigger an armed response.Replies: @shale boi
This will have to suffice.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11715577/Marco-Rubio-Chinese-spy-balloon-message-Beijing-believes-U-S-decline.html?ito=native_share_article-top
One or two bullets would have done nothing to a giant balloon - it's like having a nail in a tire - it can take days for the air to leak out. A rogue weather balloon took 1,000 shots in 1998 and it did not come down:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10td3dh/til_in_1998_american_british_and_canadian_air/
A balloon like like this is not like a birthday balloon that just pops. The helium is at very low pressure at that altitude.
The only way to bring it down was to rip the envelope to shreds. The cost of the missile is trivial in relation to the national security importance.
I am just amazed at the level of distrust people have in the DoD. They don't always make the best decisions but they are not on the payroll of the Chinese.Replies: @Curle, @Eagle Eye, @anon
Nice misdirection BUT:
The point of the DOD’s actions was – as so often – NARRATIVE MAINTENANCE. If the payload ends up on land or – horror of horrors – is seen by “civilians,” word might leak out that the device was perhaps not a super-high powered spy assembly.
In terms of international intrigue, it is quite conceivable that China intentionally launched a balloon/airship featuring an ambiguous payload, as a warning. Obviously, no high-tech camera or communications gear would be included given the virtual certainty of capture.
The fact that the DOD did NOT seek to secure the payload during its leisurely drift across the U.S. indicates that they KNOW what the payload consists of but prefer to keep the details “classified.”
Having spent months raising the temperature vis-a-vis China, DOD is hardly going to be seen doing the bidding of the CCP, no matter how many DOD officials and politicians China has managed to get its Fangs into, or vice versa.
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
Re (2): Why couldn’t the Chinese government just get the thousand of grad students or post-Docs working for it here to take pictures from even closer up?
Question:
How is it possible to precisely steer and navigate a high altitude hydrogen/helium balloon which appears to be of the globular non dirigible shape rather than the traditional cigar airship type?
The device appeared to be festooned with solar panels, possibly to supply power to a propelling system.
These things just drift willy-nilly.
A few years ago there was quite a craze for random nutters to tie a whole festoon of medium size helium balloons to an ordinary armchair, and for the nutter to be thus carried aloft in his chair to wherever the wind blew him. Usually, the nutter was armed with an air pistol to exert some sort of ‘control’ over his flight path.
All well and good, publicity ensued and more and more nutters outdid each other in the daring of their flights.
All until a Catholic priest in Brazil took to the stunt, was blown clear into the Atlantic and never seen again ….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY
https://img.libquotes.com/pic-quotes/v1/molly-ivins-quote-lbq2c5i.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Buzz Mohawk, @Greta Handel
Thanks. I always did like the original German version.
That’s a weirdly defensive comment.
How familiar are you with the other material published at The Unz Review?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY
https://img.libquotes.com/pic-quotes/v1/molly-ivins-quote-lbq2c5i.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Buzz Mohawk, @Greta Handel
Does Derb know you’re taking this ChiCom threat so lightly?
Always wondered what Trump meant by ‘high flying assets’ 3 mins 40 secs into this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FvqgvWx_l8g
Andrew Anglin? Jung-Freud?
How much money would you need to break free from this silly place and strike out on your own?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast, @Greta Handel, @Anonymous, @Dumbo
For my money, Anglin is much more interesting than Sailer, at least he’s funny. Sailer is just… Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t much get his point. I think he found a niche but which is a really small niche, with his “HBD” schtick.
“Jung-Freud” has no business being a writer. He has occasional insights but he’s way too repetitive and prolix. He needs to learn how to write, or hire an editor.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008754750/chinese-spy-balloon-montana.htmlReplies: @tyrone
….They could have shot it down over the Alaskan or Canadian hinterlands ,nice and quiet ,but no, the ham-handed assholes had to let it turn into a circus. I guess that’s the cost of having an Alzheimers patient as president.
They’re far too busy stealing all our bleeding edge technical research and passing updates to Beijing on a regular basis.
https://i.redd.it/0ye6gris6yd11.jpg
Hashed our mellow for balloons.Replies: @Prof. Woland, @G. Poulin
Or maybe it was LED Zeppelin that hashed our mellow. Scary things, those heavier-than-air balloons. Never know when one of those things is going to fall out of the sky and plonk you on the head.
The USA is a vast country, the idea that no foreign balloon is allowed over this huge territory is funny. Also it was a good idea of the Biden administration to avoid any danger to US civilians. Imagine it would have destroyed some property of an US citizen and they would have tried to get compensation from PRC - all very troublesome.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @YetAnotherAnon, @Kylie
Sorry, Erik, but I don’t agree with the excuse of “don’t want to hurt anyone on the ground.” The West is HUGE. Montana is huge. One could drop a 1970s land yacht out of a C-130 on the hour 24/7/365 over randomly generated lat/long’s, and nobody would find any for a good while.
92 weather balloons bigger than Nena’s nine and nine-zig (?) red Luft Balloons are released twice daily by guys working part-time for the NOAA to get winds and temperatures aloft. I happened to see a guy release one in Western Washington State – Quillayute to the west of the Olympic Mountains. It was bigger than the one in the picture in this link too, and I swear he told us it was filled with Hydrogen, but don’t quote me on that – this was 15 years back.
He told us that it was very rare for someone to sent the fairly expensive payload back in, with instructions and I’m sure info about reimbursement for shipping. It’s not that people are all selfish and want the souvenirs. It’s just that this is a BIG country.
Zwei und neunzig Luft Balloons,
gaining atmospheric data.
Set them each free twice a day,
so set your clock to Zulu time.
The President is on the line,
obliviously hung out to dry.
His mind is a low-pressure center,
as zwei und neunzig luft balloons go by.
(Gonna work on the lyrics for a blog post Monday.)
Oh, and you can only get winds if you've got GPS or can otherwise track the things. I'm not sure how they got pressures aloft before some other way of measuring altitude (again, GPS), as altitude of the radiosonde would be otherwise based on pressure itself.
Not a bad part-time gig - NOAA balloon operator. Unfortunately this guy's other time for release was 2 or 3 in the morning.
All well and good, publicity ensued and more and more nutters outdid each other in the daring of their flights.
All until a Catholic priest in Brazil took to the stunt, was blown clear into the Atlantic and never seen again ....Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
This is not a time for levity (pun and James Taylor* reference intended), but do you know the story of Lawn Chair Larry Walters and the 43 balloons?
That Peak Stupidity post, with interviews of Larry, along with a summary and a Billy Joel song, is from the 40th anniversary of his 3 mile cross-country flight, which was on July 2nd of 1982.
Did the nutters you describe all get the idea from this one Los Angeleno?
.
* Intro. to Machine Gun Kelly from his Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon album.
Meanwhile 10 million Chinese Ph.D. students across the country are sending petabytes of trade and military secrets back home each day.
Oh yeah, but a balloon took a picture of a cow pasture, better get excited for a war!
You know, the funniest part is if China wanted to conquer and dominate us they could just move half their population here and dare us to mass deport them.
Thing is, if I’m fixing to conquer America, I’m going to wait for Americans to depopulate themselves first. Americans are useless people, and a net negative to the land they inhabit. Imagine trying to get them to farm rice, you’d have less trouble farming twice as much rice by yourself.
gaining atmospheric data.
Set them each free twice a day,
so set your clock to Zulu time.The President is on the line,
obliviously hung out to dry.
His mind is a low-pressure center,
as zwei und neunzig luft balloons go by.(Gonna work on the lyrics for a blog post Monday.)Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Correction: I see the article says 20% of the radiosondes are returned. The guy had told me only a few, but that was then.
Oh, and you can only get winds if you’ve got GPS or can otherwise track the things. I’m not sure how they got pressures aloft before some other way of measuring altitude (again, GPS), as altitude of the radiosonde would be otherwise based on pressure itself.
Not a bad part-time gig – NOAA balloon operator. Unfortunately this guy’s other time for release was 2 or 3 in the morning.
The narrative here is getting way out of hand.
This was not a surveillance balloon, it was a weather balloon, which poses absolutely no threat to anybody and of which many hundreds are released around the world, each and every day. The fact that this was engineered into a political issue and then the balloon destroyed by the military in a very public way is evidence of just how shaky the regime is. It is the governmental equivalent of beating up an old lady to look tough.
And these types of balloons are always filled with hydrogen, not helium. Hydrogen has twice the lifting potential of helium and it can be generated onsite, whereas helium is an expensive and limited resource that has better uses than as an all-purpose lifting gas.
Weather research is the international standard cover story for airborne surveillance and has been since the 1950s.
That’s a weirdly uninformed comment. How familiar are you with the commenter to whom I replied?
I mocked him, because he very pompously considers himself above “the likes of Steven Sailer” and routinely insults the latter, but keeps coming back and commenting on Mr. Sailer’s blog.
I think he tried writing a blog of his own (or something), but folded, because only a handful of people ever read him.
He tries to insult me occasionally as well, but falls flat on his face, because he gets the facts wrong. Despite (or perhaps because of) his pomposity, he suffers from a basic reading comprehension problem.
2) You can get better pictures while the balloon loiters at 60,000 feet than you can from a spy satellite further up that will go by faster.Replies: @George, @tyrone, @The Wild Geese Howard, @Loyalty Over IQ Worship, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob
Both sides are making this way too complicated. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a airship or a balloon, or whether it’s carrying spy gear or bricks, or is steered or drifting. It doesn’t matter if it came from China or Tokyo or Fairbanks. When something that big and mysterious enters US airspace over Alaska and doesn’t respond to radio calls, you intercept the intruder and if unresponsive, shoot the damned thing down over a glacier or something. We used to have squadrons of F-106s that patrolled over Alaska looking for (and occasionally finding) stray Soviet bombers and escorting them back to the USSR. If one of those guys hadn’t altered course, they would have turned him into wreckage.
If you want it chapter and verse, the balloon was in Class E airspace and by default on IFR because there was no observer aboard. IFR aircraft in Class E fall under air traffic control, and if they don’t answer radio calls, they’re breaking the law and subject to countermeasures.
Above 60,000 ft, a little over 10 miles, it'd be in Class E - no clearance required up there because it's very hard to hit someone, because hardly anyone goes up there. Below 18,000 ft, yes, it's Class E unless in B, C, or D, which are within certain distance from certain airports. No radio contact or clearance is required within E airspace.*
.
* For that matter, also in G airspace - think of G as "Ground", as this only exists pretty close to the ground 700 or 1,200 ft up.
So better to get your real identity my lovely!
Yet you apparently didn’t comprehend my question:
One of the Noticeable things about this blog is the Exceptional! insularity of Mr. Sailer and many of his most prodigious commenters, typified by those of vinteuil in this thread.
I thought about dismissing you as a troll, but gave you another shot. I shouldn’t have.
And, for the record, other materials on Unz are a mixed bag. Audacious Epigone, when he was active, had the best blog going. His writing was sober, temperate, and highly evidence-based. He always corrected himself and acknowledged mistakes or errors. Of course, when free speech is prized, as it is by the owner of the site, and all manners of writers are given a venue, there is bound to be lots of cranky stuff. YMMV.Replies: @Greta Handel, @shale boi
I would love to see the same characters dealing with the Fall a decade on, but who knows, I loved Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and was baffled that they couldn’t do one more season of that, considering the utter garbage they say yes to. The first season of the X-Files were some of the best television ever. The writers expected to be cancelled every season and cobbled stuff together in a hurry when they weren’t.
The Chinese don't need balloon pics of American terrain. They aren't going to launch an invasion of North America or get into a nuclear war with us.
However, this does proof the awesome capabilities of the F-22. It went up against a balloon and actually won.Replies: @J.Ross, @Jamsportle
Not one but two Pfizer revelations, both devastating.
Mishandled documents.
Revelation that yes Hunter is being investigated.
Russia starts to mess up the Plan in Ukraine.
The Pentagon confirms that yes there are bioweapons labs there.
The government: “It is balloon!”
Not in government. While the boss is busy keeping up on his Equity/Diversity training some clerk about seven floors down in the building realizes she can avoid a boring and laborious cataloging task by simply recycling some dusty old tapes.Replies: @jsm
LOL Good point.
‘cept for the inconvenient fact, in this case, that the tapes were ostensibly reused in the ’80s before DIE really got going good.
QUOTE And then on May 7, 1981, Code 863.1 reported that it needed to procure 164,220 reels
of magnetic tape required by the Network Logistics Depot, the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, and three other NASA centers over an eight-month period. Sitting in the
library that day, Nafzger could only think, “Wow, it looks like there’s a rational
connection between the pull out of tapes and the shortage of one-inch magnetic tapes. I
didn’t find a smoking gun and they didn’t reference the WNRC in name, but they did
reference the need for tapes.”
The day Neil Armstrong and Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walked on moon, the tracking
stations faithfully recorded the event. Nafzger figures that each of the three stations
used 15 one-inch tape reels to record the actual event, meaning that Goddard received
a total of 45 tapes documenting the history-making occasion. Because the WNRC no
longer stored the Apollo-era tapes, Nafzger could draw only one conclusion based on
what he read in the weeklies: The 45 Apollo 11 tapes were degaussed, recertified, and
reused to satisfy a NASA-wide shortage of one-inch tapes more than a decade later. UNQUOTE
So NASA claims they think it was in the ’80s that the tapes got taped over, and this discovery was only made when Moon Hoax Theorists demanded a FOIA release of the telemetry tapes. “Oh oopsie, you want those tapes, ha ha we recorded over them later on. Sorry about that.” Suuuurrrre you did.
You are a moron. The only scandal in Libya was that the US government was shipping weapons stolen from the Libyan government to al-Qaeda in Syria. The GOP in Congress supported that policy so they didn’t bring it up. Instead, they tried to claim that Hilary somehow wanted the American “troops” who were doing the smuggling that she ordered dead, just because she is evil and kills her own henchmen for no reason.
The GOP created a fake scandal to cover up the real scandal and conservative masses fell for it like the braindead morons they are.
Many years ago, when I started reading this blog, the alternative right attracted critically minded people who didn’t fall for low-IQ GOP talking media points. Now, most of the people around the new “dissident right” are the same retards who fall for every GOP media op. The GOP is reorienting to goofy, untrue conspiracy theories as a way to bait voters away from populism and nationalism.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon-bomb-killed-six-americansfive-them-children-oregon-180972259/
Loiter was a poor choice of words. The point I was trying to make is that a balloon passing over a target more slowly and at a lower altitude will collect better info than a fast moving satellite higher up.
I suspect the ChiComms were interested in Elint (radars, etc.) as well as Imint.
But their main point was to test us, and they succeeded in making the USA a world wide laughing stock.
I am not a huge fan of DJT, but this s**t would not have happened if he were still in office. The balloon would have been shot down in Alaska.
The US government has its own balloons, two or three of which are always on station monitoring the country.
They finally shot down the Chicom balloon in a meaningless kabuki theater gesture:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/suspected-chinese-spy-balloon-spotted-over-north-carolina-us-might-shoot-it-down-over
Beijing probably gave Austin the go ahead after verifying the data on the balloon had been transmitted back to the motherland via satellite relay.Replies: @Ben Kurtz
I can’t exactly dismiss the Chinese Have Compromised All Our Institutions theory of events, but I find the Glomar Explorer theory of events equally plausible:
We wanted to maximize our odds of recovering the spy payload intact, for forensic analysis back in a secret hanger in Area 51 without the rest of the world ogling it, so our military leaders decided that shooting the balloon down over shallow water was the best bet. No risk it disappears into the impenetrable underbrush. Not going to bounce off some hard rocks into a canyon and break into a thousand pieces to be scattered by the wind. No chance it lands on Bubba’s ranch and he gets into a protracted standoff with the Feds over letting them onto Muh Property, and in the meantime he releases a TikTok video with detailed views of the recovered equipment for the world to see.
You’ve got to trade the cost of letting that thing float over the rest of the U.S., sending back whatever data we don’t manage to jam, with the benefit of maximizing our odds of an intact recovery outside the full glare of the public. Apparently it splashed down in 47 feet of water, which is so shallow that a scuba diver with the most basic levels of PADI certification could handle the recovery.
My pet theory is that China regularly uses these things to spy on their own people as well as second- and third-tier countries like in in Africa and South America – places that probably won’t even notice the incursion – and that this balloon was an accident that drifted off course and caused an Unfortunate Incident.
Maybe we pay China the stated cost of the equipment as reparations as a bit of a public kowtow — a public embarrassment to us to cap off a strategic private win for us.
Always more or less in the same areas and often by pilots, who observe sudden changes in direction and sudden acceleration (jetstream)
Thanks, Joe. That makes sense, but I do know that the sound wave method yielded additional information. Quite simply, it worked, and as such was kept secret.
My quibble was with Steve writing that the Roswell balloon was supposed to fly all the way to Russia. It wasn’t. That would have been patently absurd and ridiculously unlikely to arrive on target or even get there.
Today, however, “we” ourselves have lighter-than-air, or as-light-as-a-feather, unmanned, aerodynamic (i.e. not balloons) powered, craft that loiter at the edge of space. Nobody ever talks about those. So far they are still “secret” from a public incapable from logically concluding that they must exist.
Nuclear bombs: Like a volcano so loud it circled the earth!
One or two bullets would have done nothing to a giant balloon - it's like having a nail in a tire - it can take days for the air to leak out. A rogue weather balloon took 1,000 shots in 1998 and it did not come down:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10td3dh/til_in_1998_american_british_and_canadian_air/
A balloon like like this is not like a birthday balloon that just pops. The helium is at very low pressure at that altitude.
The only way to bring it down was to rip the envelope to shreds. The cost of the missile is trivial in relation to the national security importance.
I am just amazed at the level of distrust people have in the DoD. They don't always make the best decisions but they are not on the payroll of the Chinese.Replies: @Curle, @Eagle Eye, @anon
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fjj316HXEAEtjLb?format=jpg&name=large
The USA is a vast country, the idea that no foreign balloon is allowed over this huge territory is funny. Also it was a good idea of the Biden administration to avoid any danger to US civilians. Imagine it would have destroyed some property of an US citizen and they would have tried to get compensation from PRC - all very troublesome.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @YetAnotherAnon, @Kylie
“The USA is a vast country, the idea that no foreign balloon is allowed over this huge territory is funny.”
In the UK a lot of fairs and village fetes feature the release of helium balloons bearing cards, asking the finder to post them back – the idea being that the card returned from the greatest distance inside say a year is the winner.
Having prevailing Westerlies the winning card is usually returned from the European mainland. I had no idea this was potentially an act of aggression that could trigger an armed response.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur9xLzOJNIs
This was not a surveillance balloon, it was a weather balloon, which poses absolutely no threat to anybody and of which many hundreds are released around the world, each and every day. The fact that this was engineered into a political issue and then the balloon destroyed by the military in a very public way is evidence of just how shaky the regime is. It is the governmental equivalent of beating up an old lady to look tough.
And these types of balloons are always filled with hydrogen, not helium. Hydrogen has twice the lifting potential of helium and it can be generated onsite, whereas helium is an expensive and limited resource that has better uses than as an all-purpose lifting gas.Replies: @Rusty Tailgate, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob, @Eagle Eye
These hundreds of weather balloons you say are released every day are not like this thing at all. “Weather balloons” like Jimspheres are a few feet in diameter, weigh less than a pound, and are filled with helium, and about all they measure is wind velocity.
Weather research is the international standard cover story for airborne surveillance and has been since the 1950s.
The Balloon strike back.
https://t.me/DonbassDevushka/43348
ID, you’re just being tiresome.
The Chinese don't need balloon pics of American terrain. They aren't going to launch an invasion of North America or get into a nuclear war with us.
However, this does proof the awesome capabilities of the F-22. It went up against a balloon and actually won.Replies: @J.Ross, @Jamsportle
Frank Luke went up against balloons and won 14 times, in a biplane.
How much did a SPAD cost?
-Discard
How is it possible to precisely steer and navigate a high altitude hydrogen/helium balloon which appears to be of the globular non dirigible shape rather than the traditional cigar airship type?
The device appeared to be festooned with solar panels, possibly to supply power to a propelling system.Replies: @Ben Kurtz
Hot air balloons climb or descend to another atmospheric level with more favorable winds.
These things just drift willy-nilly.
WTF?
Yes, Hunter Biden is still loose and open for business!
Speaking of memory holes, what ever happened to the “investigation” of the Nord Stream II pipeline sabotage?
Supposedly Sweden was doing some in depth research since it happened near them.
Oddly, zero results reported.
I first suspected crazy Putin (since he denied it) but as Biden & Co. also denied it, I’m leaning towards it being a US-Polish operation.
Bad Polish joke: The Poles were lobster fishing with dynamite but got too close to the pipeline…
So aside from keeping the Germans cold this winter, or paying a lot more for gas, why would Biden do this? Crazy. It probably qualifies as “terrorism” under some treaties or at least some very expensive and pointless vandalism.
In fact so stupid that they aren’t bragging about doing it. Even the anti Russian warmongers won’t take credit for this insane project. In a few months or years, the Poles will brag about it. They hate both Germans and Russians, as a general rule.
2nd the photographic array is suspended well below the balloon and would not be bouncing around. I'm sure that it is well stabilized.
There is a lot we don't know about how these things work but hopefully they will be able to recover a lot of the wreckage and gain a better understanding of how these things phone home, the sensors on board, etc. It's true that satellites can already take razor sharp photos but this airship might have other capabilities outside the visible spectrum.Replies: @annonymous, @Muggles, @David Davenport
And yet strangely enough, none of the marvelous Chinese add-ons you mention have been seen in any of the dozens or hundreds of photos of said balloon. Only a very large white balloon.
No propellers and no dangling photographic array.
Have the Chinese also invented invisibility cloaking? If so, why waste that on some silly balloon overflight?
If you have seen such a photo documenting your claims, please share.
I comprehended it fine. I just found it irrelevant. You were clearly unaware of the past commenting history of that commenter and didn’t understand why I wrote what I did. Instead you went immediately to ad hominem (or argument by psych analysis – “weirdly defensive”) with someone you have not exchanged words before.
I thought about dismissing you as a troll, but gave you another shot. I shouldn’t have.
And, for the record, other materials on Unz are a mixed bag. Audacious Epigone, when he was active, had the best blog going. His writing was sober, temperate, and highly evidence-based. He always corrected himself and acknowledged mistakes or errors. Of course, when free speech is prized, as it is by the owner of the site, and all manners of writers are given a venue, there is bound to be lots of cranky stuff. YMMV.
I think I have seen a few decent articles, but a lot of stuff that wasn't well reasoned (not saying I agreed/not, saying that they weren't full f evidence for their theses.) Mostly stuff that is less fascinating than quiz show, Chicago market research, MBA, movie buff Steve.
Makes me want to take another look at the site. Seem to remember one dude with interesting movie reviews. Didn't generally agree. But they were lush with detail and argument. There was also some guy who would write decent travel stuff in the Balkans. Can't remember name of either though.
I thought about dismissing you as a troll, but gave you another shot. I shouldn’t have.
And, for the record, other materials on Unz are a mixed bag. Audacious Epigone, when he was active, had the best blog going. His writing was sober, temperate, and highly evidence-based. He always corrected himself and acknowledged mistakes or errors. Of course, when free speech is prized, as it is by the owner of the site, and all manners of writers are given a venue, there is bound to be lots of cranky stuff. YMMV.Replies: @Greta Handel, @shale boi
Nearly 200 comments this year from Twinkie, each one posted under a Sailer column.
I think that answers my question.
In the UK a lot of fairs and village fetes feature the release of helium balloons bearing cards, asking the finder to post them back - the idea being that the card returned from the greatest distance inside say a year is the winner.
Having prevailing Westerlies the winning card is usually returned from the European mainland. I had no idea this was potentially an act of aggression that could trigger an armed response.Replies: @shale boi
What if the Chinese escalate to message-bottles?
I thought about dismissing you as a troll, but gave you another shot. I shouldn’t have.
And, for the record, other materials on Unz are a mixed bag. Audacious Epigone, when he was active, had the best blog going. His writing was sober, temperate, and highly evidence-based. He always corrected himself and acknowledged mistakes or errors. Of course, when free speech is prized, as it is by the owner of the site, and all manners of writers are given a venue, there is bound to be lots of cranky stuff. YMMV.Replies: @Greta Handel, @shale boi
I haven’t looked at the rest of the site much. Was fine when Steve had his own blog.
I think I have seen a few decent articles, but a lot of stuff that wasn’t well reasoned (not saying I agreed/not, saying that they weren’t full f evidence for their theses.) Mostly stuff that is less fascinating than quiz show, Chicago market research, MBA, movie buff Steve.
Makes me want to take another look at the site. Seem to remember one dude with interesting movie reviews. Didn’t generally agree. But they were lush with detail and argument. There was also some guy who would write decent travel stuff in the Balkans. Can’t remember name of either though.
The USA is a vast country, the idea that no foreign balloon is allowed over this huge territory is funny. Also it was a good idea of the Biden administration to avoid any danger to US civilians. Imagine it would have destroyed some property of an US citizen and they would have tried to get compensation from PRC - all very troublesome.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @YetAnotherAnon, @Kylie
Sorry, not ignoring you, just too groggy from allergies to formulate a reply.
This will have to suffice.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11715577/Marco-Rubio-Chinese-spy-balloon-message-Beijing-believes-U-S-decline.html?ito=native_share_article-top
https://www.gasworld.com/story/air-products-inks-potential-1bn-helium-deal-with-nasa/
The flat-earthers out there say that all those 'satellites' are really held up by balloons ... which is why NASA has been using all that helium for decades. Just sayin' ...
Here's a domestic USA 'balloon crash' of one supposedly sent-up by Google, with satellite-type gear that looks like the Chinese payload that was flying over America
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1675535557016811.jpgReplies: @Joe Stalin
NASA designed the Apollo Lunar Module descent engine to be a constant flow device with a BIG helium tank for landing.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730011150/downloads/19730011150.pdf
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/LM04_Lunar_Module_ppLV1-17.pdf
The GOP and it’s media propaganda arm will continue to push stupid narratives about fake “scandals” like Benghazi in order to avoid taking populist positions on the real issues.
What are the real issues? Please describe the populist positions you’d like the Republicans to take on the real issues.
2nd the photographic array is suspended well below the balloon and would not be bouncing around. I'm sure that it is well stabilized.
There is a lot we don't know about how these things work but hopefully they will be able to recover a lot of the wreckage and gain a better understanding of how these things phone home, the sensors on board, etc. It's true that satellites can already take razor sharp photos but this airship might have other capabilities outside the visible spectrum.Replies: @annonymous, @Muggles, @David Davenport
… it has propellers …
What’s your source for that?
Whether it specifically had propellers vs some other type of propulsion system I can't say for sure. Maybe it's just vanes or something but we know that it had the ability to maneuver. And it had very large solar arrays, much larger than you would need just to power electronics. The Chinese themselves called it an "airship" and not a balloon. Airships are steerable by definition.Replies: @Greta Handel
Oh yeah, but a balloon took a picture of a cow pasture, better get excited for a war!
You know, the funniest part is if China wanted to conquer and dominate us they could just move half their population here and dare us to mass deport them.Replies: @Hibernian, @Corn
A missile base. FIFY
No propellers and no dangling photographic array.
Have the Chinese also invented invisibility cloaking? If so, why waste that on some silly balloon overflight?
If you have seen such a photo documenting your claims, please share.Replies: @Jack D
What would the point be of sending just a balloon?
Here you can see the dangling payload (mainly the massive solar cells that operate it all – what do think all of those solar cells power – a rice cooker?)
The photos are not very good because they were taken from the ground and the balloon was more that 10 miles up in the air. For scale, the solar array from end to end was supposedly the length of 3 buses or something like that.
I have seen those black rectangles but assumed they were some kind of printing on the balloon.
These appear to be solar panels.
I don't see any propellers of any kind. If so they are quite small. I doubt enough to actually steer this large balloon. Might be able to rotate it if propellers exist.
As to the point of a pure balloon, I assume most "weather balloons" are transmitting from inside the balloon structure.
There has been much bally-hoo over the "Chinese balloon" but almost no factual discussion of what they are made of, how equipped, etc. I guess "facts" are no longer needed in Soviet American journalism.
"Just believe us!" Replies: @Jack D
If you want it chapter and verse, the balloon was in Class E airspace and by default on IFR because there was no observer aboard. IFR aircraft in Class E fall under air traffic control, and if they don't answer radio calls, they're breaking the law and subject to countermeasures.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
This is somewhat backwards, Rusty. If this thing were 10 miles up even, that’d be inside “A” airspace in which one must be IFR, i.e. needing a clearance and to stay in radio contact. That’d be the case till it were under 18,000 ft (not exactly 18,0o0, depending on pressure altitude), which is 3 1/2 statute (normal) miles. That doesn’t make the balloon IFR – that’s just the problem. It’s unmanned with no clearance or radio contact.
Above 60,000 ft, a little over 10 miles, it’d be in Class E – no clearance required up there because it’s very hard to hit someone, because hardly anyone goes up there. Below 18,000 ft, yes, it’s Class E unless in B, C, or D, which are within certain distance from certain airports. No radio contact or clearance is required within E airspace.*
.
* For that matter, also in G airspace – think of G as “Ground”, as this only exists pretty close to the ground 700 or 1,200 ft up.
This was not a surveillance balloon, it was a weather balloon, which poses absolutely no threat to anybody and of which many hundreds are released around the world, each and every day. The fact that this was engineered into a political issue and then the balloon destroyed by the military in a very public way is evidence of just how shaky the regime is. It is the governmental equivalent of beating up an old lady to look tough.
And these types of balloons are always filled with hydrogen, not helium. Hydrogen has twice the lifting potential of helium and it can be generated onsite, whereas helium is an expensive and limited resource that has better uses than as an all-purpose lifting gas.Replies: @Rusty Tailgate, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob, @Eagle Eye
No, it doesn’t I.D. I used to figure this same thing just due to H atoms being half the molecular weight of He.
Think about what buoyancy is though. One can do the Calculus, but the lift ends up as being the difference between the weight of the material inside and the weight of the volume of the material it floats in for that volume displaced.
So, air is 78% N2 and 20% O2 (forget the rest for this calculation). So that’s a mix of 80% gas with molecular wt of 28 gm/mole and 20% of a molecular weight of 32 gm/mole. I’m doing this in my head for now, so let’s just take the average weight as 29 gm/mole.
(I’ll leave out the (same) units from here, but each must be multiplied by g. g and V cancel out.) So you’ve got either 29 – 1 x V of the balloon x g for Hydrogen and (29 – 2) x Vg for Helium. That ratio of lifting force is only 28/27. Hydrogen gives less than 4% more lift. Plus, Lakehurst, New Jersey!
Sound right, Physicist Dave, or did I get something wrong?
PS: All this assumes that the air and the H or He behave as ideal gases. At these P’s and T’s, they do.
When you’re looking at it that way, it’s actually about 8%, as is explained here. I take your point, but in my head I was actually thinking “lifting force per mass of lifting gas” and not “lifting force per volume of lifting gas.”
"Jung-Freud" has no business being a writer. He has occasional insights but he's way too repetitive and prolix. He needs to learn how to write, or hire an editor.Replies: @HammerJack
PF is preposterously prolix, no doubt about it, and most definitely could use an editor. But his insights are more numerous than you believe, imho.
The obvious difficulty is that few of us have several hours a day to devote to that one writer.
I’m torn between considering William Carlos Williams’s trenchant advice about the difficulty of good poetry, and the inclination of FedExing PF a meat cleaver for his keyboard.
Looking at it “that way” means looking at the lifting force per volume of balloon. It’s under 4%. Yes, it’d be double, 7.5% or so, if you are calculating it per mass of gas loaded.
Which is “right” for the comparison? That depends on which is your bigger cost, the gas, or the balloon envelope?
What's your source for that?Replies: @Jack D
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288141/pentagon-press-secretary-brig-gen-pat-ryder-holds-an-on-camera-press-briefing/
Whether it specifically had propellers vs some other type of propulsion system I can’t say for sure. Maybe it’s just vanes or something but we know that it had the ability to maneuver. And it had very large solar arrays, much larger than you would need just to power electronics. The Chinese themselves called it an “airship” and not a balloon. Airships are steerable by definition.
Reminds me of another Pat that used to pronounce Establishment narratives around here.
Although 4% is not the exact right number, conceptually you are correct. Let’s say that you could somehow pump a vacuum inside the balloon so it weighed absolutely nothing inside. The least the contents of the balloon could weigh is zero so the maximum buoyant force possible would be the weight of the air that is displaced. If you fill the balloon with a gas that has 5% or 10% of the density of air you are only going to lose a few % of buoyancy vs. weighing nothing at all – the main factor is that air is really heavy, not that the lifting gas is light. It’s like if you take a boat whose hold is filled with Styrofoam and you fill it with balsa wood instead, the boat is only going to sink down very slightly in the water because, compared to the weight of water, both balsa wood and Styrofoam are very light.
Whether it specifically had propellers vs some other type of propulsion system I can't say for sure. Maybe it's just vanes or something but we know that it had the ability to maneuver. And it had very large solar arrays, much larger than you would need just to power electronics. The Chinese themselves called it an "airship" and not a balloon. Airships are steerable by definition.Replies: @Greta Handel
So you and General Pat Ryder are in the same “we”?
Reminds me of another Pat that used to pronounce Establishment narratives around here.
Thanks.
I have seen those black rectangles but assumed they were some kind of printing on the balloon.
These appear to be solar panels.
I don’t see any propellers of any kind. If so they are quite small. I doubt enough to actually steer this large balloon. Might be able to rotate it if propellers exist.
As to the point of a pure balloon, I assume most “weather balloons” are transmitting from inside the balloon structure.
There has been much bally-hoo over the “Chinese balloon” but almost no factual discussion of what they are made of, how equipped, etc. I guess “facts” are no longer needed in Soviet American journalism.
“Just believe us!”
This was not a surveillance balloon, it was a weather balloon, which poses absolutely no threat to anybody and of which many hundreds are released around the world, each and every day. The fact that this was engineered into a political issue and then the balloon destroyed by the military in a very public way is evidence of just how shaky the regime is. It is the governmental equivalent of beating up an old lady to look tough.
And these types of balloons are always filled with hydrogen, not helium. Hydrogen has twice the lifting potential of helium and it can be generated onsite, whereas helium is an expensive and limited resource that has better uses than as an all-purpose lifting gas.Replies: @Rusty Tailgate, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob, @Eagle Eye
I don’t GAFF if the balloon’s mission was to save the gay baby whales. It was from a hostile foreign country and was in our sovereign air space for a week!
I remember that! I also remember something in meatpacking…. didn’t some meatpacking plants get hacked too? I don’t remember exactly who all got hacked but it seemed early in Biden’s administration multiple industries on the Left’s hate list were hacked and the administration/media’s response was basically, “Meh”.
Oh yeah, but a balloon took a picture of a cow pasture, better get excited for a war!
You know, the funniest part is if China wanted to conquer and dominate us they could just move half their population here and dare us to mass deport them.Replies: @Hibernian, @Corn
Hey, buy your weather balloons straight from Aliexpress store shipped to your door no middleman!
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1100863332?spm=a2g0o.detail.100005.1.5bfd5773yl2Vuy
I have seen those black rectangles but assumed they were some kind of printing on the balloon.
These appear to be solar panels.
I don't see any propellers of any kind. If so they are quite small. I doubt enough to actually steer this large balloon. Might be able to rotate it if propellers exist.
As to the point of a pure balloon, I assume most "weather balloons" are transmitting from inside the balloon structure.
There has been much bally-hoo over the "Chinese balloon" but almost no factual discussion of what they are made of, how equipped, etc. I guess "facts" are no longer needed in Soviet American journalism.
"Just believe us!" Replies: @Jack D
Pentagon says that it had capability of being maneuvered. Exactly what this consists of they (purposely) did not say, but like I said before you wouldn’t need such enormous panels just to communicate . For example, a Starlink with a bandwith of 100mbps only requires around 300W of solar (plus a battery) for 24/7 self-sufficiency which would be an array of around 12 sf. (4’x3′). This array appears to be at least 50x bigger than that if not more.
California rice farmers do a helluva good job. Do you think rice can be grown in the Midwest, fool?
See also how the PRC is now doing more maize than rice, of course to feed their animals as they go up from subsistence consumption. Should not have to detail how we love corn and corn fed animals in the US.... See also soybeans and peanuts which the Chinese also love.
Steve was Jerry Pournelle’s neighbor? Cool!
Jerry was the ultimate curmudgeon, probably the last of the Heinlein-esque writers who wrote sci-fi to entertain and did most of it from the perspective of a virile heterosexual muscular white male. (Well, Heinlein did have some of that weird gender-bending hippy dippy stuff, but not Jerry).
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1504891265598459905
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1504968118182952962
Also Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas per Wikipedia and memory. This guy has never heard of Calrose or Teximati as well. From vague memory of when I last calculated it at the start of COVID about sixty pounds per capita, per what I could find in a moment with Bing 7.1 million tonnes in 2018-9. Sane water management in California could probably lift that a fair amount.
See also how the PRC is now doing more maize than rice, of course to feed their animals as they go up from subsistence consumption. Should not have to detail how we love corn and corn fed animals in the US…. See also soybeans and peanuts which the Chinese also love.
This was not a surveillance balloon, it was a weather balloon, which poses absolutely no threat to anybody and of which many hundreds are released around the world, each and every day. The fact that this was engineered into a political issue and then the balloon destroyed by the military in a very public way is evidence of just how shaky the regime is. It is the governmental equivalent of beating up an old lady to look tough.
And these types of balloons are always filled with hydrogen, not helium. Hydrogen has twice the lifting potential of helium and it can be generated onsite, whereas helium is an expensive and limited resource that has better uses than as an all-purpose lifting gas.Replies: @Rusty Tailgate, @Achmed E. Newman, @Jim Don Bob, @Eagle Eye
Although I agree that the whole story as played in the U.S. MSM has been largely theater, it does seem that we are looking at something more than a simple weather balloon.
The size of the balloon itself and in particular the size of the solar panels indicates that there is some serious processing happening, perhaps radar and/or high-resolution moving imaging, with related satellite transmission back to China. On the other hand, the payload will certainly have been commercial grade, open-market gear rather than military technology given the high risk of capture.
As stated above, it could well be that China intentionally launched an ambiguous payload in order to test U.S. defenses. It is well known that such low-level challenges have been a regular occurrence among the super powers since at least the beginning of the Cold War.
Apart from strictly military aspects of the U.S. response (detection, tracking, interdiction), the Chinese will be interested in internal processes at DOD, State, CIA etc., and related PR efforts against the background of the current political climate.
From what I have read the balloon flew over the Aleutians and then Alaska before entering the airspace over the continental U.S. If the Pentagon was serious about air defense instead of putting trannies in the Marine Corps they would have shot it down over some remote Aleutian Island.
They didn't.Replies: @trevor
It was a foreign invasive vehicle that should have been shot down as soon as discovered entering US airspace.
Such a vehicle could carry a nuclear bomb and/or an EMP pulse device.
Mossad:
“Look, goyim! The Chinese are spying on you!”
That could explain the numerous UFO’s seen from time to time over Southern Africa!
Always more or less in the same areas and often by pilots, who observe sudden changes in direction and sudden acceleration (jetstream)
Jerry was the ultimate curmudgeon, probably the last of the Heinlein-esque writers who wrote sci-fi to entertain and did most of it from the perspective of a virile heterosexual muscular white male. (Well, Heinlein did have some of that weird gender-bending hippy dippy stuff, but not Jerry).Replies: @MEH 0910
https://www.dailynews.com/2021/07/30/studio-city-home-of-late-sci-fi-author-jerry-pournelle-seeks-1-8-million/