12 ms·

I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4

by cududa 4y ago

I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4 school busses. I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story. But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion? I ask simply because a payload the length of 3-4 school busses (apparently 45 feet) would be quite large and the ballon itself much much larger than I was imagining

ricardobeat 4y ago
Multiple people reported that it was visible to naked eye from the ground, it must have been huge for that.
- heartbreak 4y ago
  I saw it from my car today while driving before I knew it was going to be in my area. It was very visible to the naked eye. It was large enough that the perspective made it seem a lot lower altitude than it actually was.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    I think it was at 60,000 ft. It’s got to be pretty damn big to be so obvious to casual ground observers. It will be very interesting to see, to the extent that details are released to the public, the parameters and specs of this thing.
  - za3faran 4y ago
    Not sure what the CCP is thinking. Are they simply trying to instigate a response with such a brazen display?
    - mike_d 4y ago
      As a data point: previously spotted surveillance blimps in the Asia Pacific theatre use a clear balloon. Either China wanted to see if it would be detected, or is woefully behind the US equivalents.
      - gonzo41 4y ago
        equivalents such as: the U2 spyplane, the BlackBird and all of the satellites they have. Oh and all the GlobalHawks.
        irthomasthomas 4y ago
        U2: 1955 BlackBird: 1964 GlobalHawk: 1998 I wonder where the cutting edge is today?
    - njharman 4y ago
      Its not like USA have never violated other nations air space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnaissance_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnais... but I guess we quit doing it to China https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-over-china-ended-to-avoid-incident-missions.html https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-o...
      - mlindner 4y ago
        Indeed, this kind of thing used to happen half a century ago before the invention of spy satellites and before Gary Powers got shot down over the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident Even the types of arguments made for this kind of thing are the same. > Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases. Claiming "weather research" is basically one of the oldest lies on the books you can make which kind of concretes the fact that it wasn't for weather research.
      - Falkon1313 4y ago
        And until a couple of years ago, we also allowed it. >The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them. >[...] >On 22 November 2020, United States official sources [...] announced that the six-month period was over and the U.S. was no longer a party to the Treaty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies
        mint2 4y ago
        Important Note: China was never part of the treaty
    - noduerme 4y ago
      To me it seems like it could also be a very cheeky response to the US declassifying all those UFO sightings and going "well, we really don't know what this is. Could be from China."
    - cm2187 4y ago
      I am equally puzzled. But the recent aggressive statement by China [1] makes me think they are testing Biden's resolve. If you fly something in a foreign country's airspace, you don't get to complain that it has been shot down, particularly if it's just hardware. It looks like some sort of provocation to see how confrontational the US gets beyond cheap speech on TV. And I can't help suspecting that what made the US wait so long to shoot it is indecisiveness. It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety. [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-spy-balloon-montana-explosion-live-tracker-b2275770.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-sp...
      - jcynix 4y ago
        >It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety. Ok, but having it drop into water should increase the chance to retrieve less damaged parts to investigate then. I'd call this thoughtful, not indecivise.
        cm2187 4y ago
        Water will behave like concrete to an object of the size and weight of a car dropping at high speed (which seems to be the payload minus the solar panels). You can just see what happened to planes that crashed into water head on. And they are claiming it was for safety purposes.
        xattt 4y ago
        Pictures from the ground showed structures like solar panels. If anything, the panels would act as sails and slow the fall and impact into the water.
        cm2187 4y ago
        Even if they had the strength, it would rotate to minimize air resistance.
        sandworm101 4y ago
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Russia frequently has military jets head for the UK, as I understand it just to test reaction time. (E.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/raf-ukraine-russia-war-b2006812.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/raf-ukraine-... as a search result, I haven't read) I assume this is something similar, just more to assess what the response is than how quick a known response is.
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        But to be fair, this sort of game is going on since the cold war in both directions.
        OJFord 4y ago
        Sure, I didn't mean to be 'unfair' or to make too much of it (it hits the news every time, as though it's at all likely it would've been a genuine threat) - just to offer another example of something I assume is similar in motive.
    - supportlocal4h 4y ago
      When I first heard of the balloon I thought it was brilliant. I am always amused at relatively cheap ideas that cost your opponent a lot. I figured this would cost the U.S. a lot. Even the President might waste 20 minutes with 15 highly paid experts being briefed on the balloon. It sounds like I was wrong about that. News reports stated the President was receiving regular ballon briefings. I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population? How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down? If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ipqk 4y ago
I don't know how big this particular one is, but high altitude balloons get really large because of the low pressure. For example, I could find that this ballon reaches 200ft diameter at 100,000 feet. https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm
- jer0me 4y ago
  Here's the image if anyone is curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20020909235156if_/http://remus.jpl.nasa.gov:80/balloon1_cpy.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20020909235156if_/http://remus.j...
- misja111 4y ago
  But weather balloons are typically much smaller. See e.g. https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/ https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/, this is the largest one they sell and it has a bursting diameter of 45ft
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    I’m pretty sure that they had a budget higher than $700 and wanted it to carry more than 3kg of payload.
  - mactunes 4y ago
    This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at. I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mberning 4y ago
The ballon was at 60k feet and eye witnesses said it had the same apparent size in the sky as passenger jets flying nearby at 30k feet.
- wayeq 4y ago
  if only i paid attention in trigonometry..
  - alanh 4y ago
    Hmm, do we even need trig? Naively I would imagine that simple proportions would hold — e.g. same visible size @ twice the distance = object is twice as big
    - californical 4y ago
      4x as big, since we see in two dimensions — you can judge length & height (but not depth). So if it appears the same size but twice as far away, the the length and height are each 2x. So that would make it the size of ~4 airplanes
      - Miserlou57 4y ago
        Not super relevant but I find this to be true when spotting a 747/757/767 vs say a 737
      - d0mine 4y ago
        the area is 4x but the diameter is just 2x here.
      - ant6n 4y ago
        Isn’t the object three-dimensional?
KennyBlanken 4y ago
It looks like the large size is mostly just solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) and their scaffolding. From some of the available photos there's two wings, each with eight panels. There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping the thing would stay aloft for a long time? My guess is that the actual package of equipment - batteries and sensors - is quite small. Maybe a telescope and gyro stabilizer or gimbal was part of the setup. Insulation probably bulked it up quite a bit; it's very, very cold at that altitude. I'd be curious what sort of uplink they were using, assuming the thing was actually fully functional as a spying device. I'd say there is a decent chance it was largely a dummy, designed to see what our reaction would be. I don't particularly like the precedent we just set. There's no evidence it was a weapon, its flight path was easily tracked and slow so our military could hardly argue it was a surveillance threat especially compared to satellites, it's well outside commercial aviation flight ranges. If they want to send balloons over us at 80,000 feet...let them? Who cares? They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery. We can hardly point fingers. The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) Or perhaps both at once. I really hope the details of this craft are published, the machine nerd in me needs to know.
- humanizersequel 4y ago
  >They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery. Is that true? Just from quickly poking around, LEO satellites seem to orbit at about triple the height, moving far faster than a balloon lazily floating along the jetstream. Probably can use a larger variety of instruments as well.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
beedeebeedee 4y ago
I can't find the article, but I think it said the balloon was the size of five football fields Edit: Different balloon https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-a-weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-25-years-ago-fighter-jets-fired-1000-rounds-at-it-and-couldnt-bring-it-down/ar-AA1753aW https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-a-weather-balloon-...
willis936 4y ago
Judging from the videos that pan from the moon to the balloon: the balloon was about 3x smaller in the sky than the moon. Knowing the altitude of the balloon was 68,000 feet, we can fudge the distance from the observer to the balloon as 100,000 feet. Knowing the distance to the moon and the radius of the moon we can use like triangles to estimate that the balloon was ~285 feet across, +/- 20% for estimates. Edit: updated the estimate. I got radius and diameter mixed up. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100000%2A%28diameter%20of%20moon%29%2F%28distance%20to%20moon%29%2F3 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100000%2A%28diameter%20...
- darkerside 4y ago
  Size of a football field, got it
  - garyfirestorm 4y ago
    How many washing machines?
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
      It's just under 73 washing machines laid on their backs end-to-end. That does assume, though, that you got the tallest possible washing machine, which stands at a whopping 47 inches, compared to the industry average of a puny not-even 41 inches. (It's honestly mind-blowing to me that I could get this data [1] in a few seconds, when it might've been nearly impossible in a sane amount of time ~10 years ago. But I'm also enjoying just citing it really casually.) [1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=washing+machine https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=washing+machine
  - petemir 4y ago
    Which football? Real football or American football?
    - vegasea 4y ago
      What is real football? I've heard of association football (shortened to soccer by the British), rugby football, Australian rules football, American football and Canadian football but I've never heard of real football.
csomar 4y ago
Then I severely underestimated the size of the thing. This is a gigantic balloon with a gigantic payload.
rich_sasha 4y ago
...and what's the volume in SI Olympic pools? EDIT how lazy of me, 285ft diameter, and assuming spherical shell, gives 166 Olympic pools.

by cududa 4y ago

ricardobeat 4y ago

Multiple people reported that it was visible to naked eye from the ground, it must have been huge for that.

heartbreak 4y ago
I saw it from my car today while driving before I knew it was going to be in my area. It was very visible to the naked eye. It was large enough that the perspective made it seem a lot lower altitude than it actually was.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I think it was at 60,000 ft. It’s got to be pretty damn big to be so obvious to casual ground observers. It will be very interesting to see, to the extent that details are released to the public, the parameters and specs of this thing.
- za3faran 4y ago
  Not sure what the CCP is thinking. Are they simply trying to instigate a response with such a brazen display?
  - mike_d 4y ago
    As a data point: previously spotted surveillance blimps in the Asia Pacific theatre use a clear balloon. Either China wanted to see if it would be detected, or is woefully behind the US equivalents.
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      equivalents such as: the U2 spyplane, the BlackBird and all of the satellites they have. Oh and all the GlobalHawks.
      - irthomasthomas 4y ago
        U2: 1955 BlackBird: 1964 GlobalHawk: 1998 I wonder where the cutting edge is today?
  - njharman 4y ago
    Its not like USA have never violated other nations air space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnaissance_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnais... but I guess we quit doing it to China https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-over-china-ended-to-avoid-incident-missions.html https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-o...
    - mlindner 4y ago
      Indeed, this kind of thing used to happen half a century ago before the invention of spy satellites and before Gary Powers got shot down over the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident Even the types of arguments made for this kind of thing are the same. > Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases. Claiming "weather research" is basically one of the oldest lies on the books you can make which kind of concretes the fact that it wasn't for weather research.
    - Falkon1313 4y ago
      And until a couple of years ago, we also allowed it. >The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them. >[...] >On 22 November 2020, United States official sources [...] announced that the six-month period was over and the U.S. was no longer a party to the Treaty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies
      - mint2 4y ago
        Important Note: China was never part of the treaty
  - noduerme 4y ago
    To me it seems like it could also be a very cheeky response to the US declassifying all those UFO sightings and going "well, we really don't know what this is. Could be from China."
  - cm2187 4y ago
    I am equally puzzled. But the recent aggressive statement by China [1] makes me think they are testing Biden's resolve. If you fly something in a foreign country's airspace, you don't get to complain that it has been shot down, particularly if it's just hardware. It looks like some sort of provocation to see how confrontational the US gets beyond cheap speech on TV. And I can't help suspecting that what made the US wait so long to shoot it is indecisiveness. It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety. [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-spy-balloon-montana-explosion-live-tracker-b2275770.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-sp...
    - jcynix 4y ago
      >It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety. Ok, but having it drop into water should increase the chance to retrieve less damaged parts to investigate then. I'd call this thoughtful, not indecivise.
      - cm2187 4y ago
        Water will behave like concrete to an object of the size and weight of a car dropping at high speed (which seems to be the payload minus the solar panels). You can just see what happened to planes that crashed into water head on. And they are claiming it was for safety purposes.
        xattt 4y ago
        Pictures from the ground showed structures like solar panels. If anything, the panels would act as sails and slow the fall and impact into the water.
        cm2187 4y ago
        Even if they had the strength, it would rotate to minimize air resistance.
        sandworm101 4y ago
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Russia frequently has military jets head for the UK, as I understand it just to test reaction time. (E.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/raf-ukraine-russia-war-b2006812.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/raf-ukraine-... as a search result, I haven't read) I assume this is something similar, just more to assess what the response is than how quick a known response is.
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      But to be fair, this sort of game is going on since the cold war in both directions.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        Sure, I didn't mean to be 'unfair' or to make too much of it (it hits the news every time, as though it's at all likely it would've been a genuine threat) - just to offer another example of something I assume is similar in motive.
  - supportlocal4h 4y ago
    When I first heard of the balloon I thought it was brilliant. I am always amused at relatively cheap ideas that cost your opponent a lot. I figured this would cost the U.S. a lot. Even the President might waste 20 minutes with 15 highly paid experts being briefed on the balloon. It sounds like I was wrong about that. News reports stated the President was receiving regular ballon briefings. I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population? How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down? If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ipqk 4y ago

I don't know how big this particular one is, but high altitude balloons get really large because of the low pressure. For example, I could find that this ballon reaches 200ft diameter at 100,000 feet. https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm

jer0me 4y ago
Here's the image if anyone is curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20020909235156if_/http://remus.jpl.nasa.gov:80/balloon1_cpy.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20020909235156if_/http://remus.j...
misja111 4y ago
But weather balloons are typically much smaller. See e.g. https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/ https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/, this is the largest one they sell and it has a bursting diameter of 45ft
- kgwgk 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure that they had a budget higher than $700 and wanted it to carry more than 3kg of payload.
- mactunes 4y ago
  This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at. I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mberning 4y ago

The ballon was at 60k feet and eye witnesses said it had the same apparent size in the sky as passenger jets flying nearby at 30k feet.

wayeq 4y ago
if only i paid attention in trigonometry..
- alanh 4y ago
  Hmm, do we even need trig? Naively I would imagine that simple proportions would hold — e.g. same visible size @ twice the distance = object is twice as big
  - californical 4y ago
    4x as big, since we see in two dimensions — you can judge length & height (but not depth). So if it appears the same size but twice as far away, the the length and height are each 2x. So that would make it the size of ~4 airplanes
    - Miserlou57 4y ago
      Not super relevant but I find this to be true when spotting a 747/757/767 vs say a 737
    - d0mine 4y ago
      the area is 4x but the diameter is just 2x here.
    - ant6n 4y ago
      Isn’t the object three-dimensional?

KennyBlanken 4y ago

It looks like the large size is mostly just solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) and their scaffolding. From some of the available photos there's two wings, each with eight panels. There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping the thing would stay aloft for a long time? My guess is that the actual package of equipment - batteries and sensors - is quite small. Maybe a telescope and gyro stabilizer or gimbal was part of the setup. Insulation probably bulked it up quite a bit; it's very, very cold at that altitude. I'd be curious what sort of uplink they were using, assuming the thing was actually fully functional as a spying device. I'd say there is a decent chance it was largely a dummy, designed to see what our reaction would be. I don't particularly like the precedent we just set. There's no evidence it was a weapon, its flight path was easily tracked and slow so our military could hardly argue it was a surveillance threat especially compared to satellites, it's well outside commercial aviation flight ranges. If they want to send balloons over us at 80,000 feet...let them? Who cares? They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery. We can hardly point fingers. The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.

LarryMullins 4y ago
> solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) Or perhaps both at once. I really hope the details of this craft are published, the machine nerd in me needs to know.
humanizersequel 4y ago
>They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery. Is that true? Just from quickly poking around, LEO satellites seem to orbit at about triple the height, moving far faster than a balloon lazily floating along the jetstream. Probably can use a larger variety of instruments as well.
- SergeAx 4y ago

beedeebeedee 4y ago

I can't find the article, but I think it said the balloon was the size of five football fields Edit: Different balloon https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-a-weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-25-years-ago-fighter-jets-fired-1000-rounds-at-it-and-couldnt-bring-it-down/ar-AA1753aW https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-a-weather-balloon-...

willis936 4y ago

Judging from the videos that pan from the moon to the balloon: the balloon was about 3x smaller in the sky than the moon. Knowing the altitude of the balloon was 68,000 feet, we can fudge the distance from the observer to the balloon as 100,000 feet. Knowing the distance to the moon and the radius of the moon we can use like triangles to estimate that the balloon was ~285 feet across, +/- 20% for estimates. Edit: updated the estimate. I got radius and diameter mixed up. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100000%2A%28diameter%20of%20moon%29%2F%28distance%20to%20moon%29%2F3 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100000%2A%28diameter%20...

darkerside 4y ago
Size of a football field, got it
- garyfirestorm 4y ago
  How many washing machines?
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
    It's just under 73 washing machines laid on their backs end-to-end. That does assume, though, that you got the tallest possible washing machine, which stands at a whopping 47 inches, compared to the industry average of a puny not-even 41 inches. (It's honestly mind-blowing to me that I could get this data [1] in a few seconds, when it might've been nearly impossible in a sane amount of time ~10 years ago. But I'm also enjoying just citing it really casually.) [1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=washing+machine https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=washing+machine
- petemir 4y ago
  Which football? Real football or American football?
  - vegasea 4y ago
    What is real football? I've heard of association football (shortened to soccer by the British), rugby football, Australian rules football, American football and Canadian football but I've never heard of real football.

csomar 4y ago

Then I severely underestimated the size of the thing. This is a gigantic balloon with a gigantic payload.

rich_sasha 4y ago

...and what's the volume in SI Olympic pools? EDIT how lazy of me, 285ft diameter, and assuming spherical shell, gives 166 Olympic pools.