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Spy balloon cost : $3k - $50k , you can even buy them on alibaba and some other sites: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-hot-sale-surveillance-b
by sabujp 4y ago
Spy balloon cost : $3k - $50k , you can even buy them on alibaba and some other sites:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-hot-sale-surveillance-balloon-with_60454941082.html
https://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/jennerjiang/product-list/catalog-1.html?view=0
Cost to shoot down balloon with F22 $400k for the AIM-9X, ~$85k for 1 hour of flight time, so ~$400 - $500k to shoot down one balloon that cost < $50k
- themodelplumber 4y agoQuite different if it's a one-off, this was nearly experimental expense for the US on various levels.
- scotty79 4y agoI guess China just discovered a strategy how to drain US of some resources. Just let out a lot of scientific baloons and let the dirft away.
- kcb 4y agoI don't think anyone considers the expenditure of 1 AIM-9, probably the most ubiquitous A2A missile platform in history, a drain of resources.
- pixl97 4y agoI mean if it became enough of an issue it would not be hard to deal with them with some other type of weapon. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA425537.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA425537.pdf Laser weapons were not highly effective against fast objects like ICBMs, but a slow moving weak object like a balloon should represent a pretty easy target.
- sebzim4500 4y agoCongrats to China for wasting about 3 seconds worth of US military budget. How will the US recover from this catastrophe?
- sebzim4500 4y agoThe balloon that was shot down was visible to the naked eye at 60k feet. It would have had to be far larger than the products you have linked to.
- sabujp 4y agothey expand
- sebzim4500 4y agoNot to 200 feet across they don't.
- dforrestwilson 4y agoWhat is the value of 1. The intelligence collected by China 2. Learning more about Chinese intelligence collection methods
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoPresumably if this becomes common we can think of cheaper ways to do it.
- sabujp 4y agoi wonder if we could do it with a SHIELD laser weapon
- anonymousiam 4y agoYou've left out the cost of the payload, which is probably substantial. If I weren't retired, I'd be interested in reverse-engineering it. I'm sure NASIC will be all over it, but we (the general public) will never get the details of what the payload was really doing.
- kcb 4y agoMeh. Complaining about the cost of shooting this down is pretty silly. F22s are already flown on a daily basis. And munitions are spent regularly in training excersises. It would cost far more millions to set up a training excersise even half as valuable. But that is just the cost of maintaining a capable fighter fleet. There's probably been sports event flyovers that have technically cost many times this.
- sabujp 4y agoahh yea i forget that the amount we budget every year for training is basically the cost of a war
- WalterBright 4y agoTrain hard means fight easy. The US has always had excellent pilot training, and it paid off handsomely in war after war.
- sabujp 4y ago[flagged]
- adeelk93 4y agoFor the pilots, it was - the US achieved air superiority quite quickly. Whatever point you’re trying to make, you lost it along the way. The outcome of of the afghan war was not ideal, but that was not caused by a lack of pilot training, that is an absolutely absurd thing to argue.
- sabujp 4y ago[flagged]
- strulovich 4y agoThis sort of calculations are slightly silly. F22s take off for training flights all the time, having one training flight switch to operational does not affect the cost. It’s similar for using missiles. The opportunity to shoot a real one at a real target is good training. Those things costs this money perhaps, but it’s not a useful way to think of it this way for such a case.
- calderknight 4y agoI think the implication is not that the cost in this specific case was very high. I think the point was that there is an assymetry in cost. So, if someone wanted to have balloons over the USA, it would be much cheaper for them to try than it would be for the USA to stop them. By the time someone starts sending 1000's of balloons, the costs to destroy them may add up.
- kodah 4y agoYou could also just be trying to apply logic to someone with a low-cost, nonsensical argument. The irony being that it's the same sort of attack you're describing, but on your brain.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pixl97 4y ago'someone' I mean it would be pretty easy to figure out who it was, if at nation state level enact things like embargos against them which would cost them quite a bit more. If not at nation state level they'd likely be taken care of much more quietly.
- calderknight 4y agoAgreed, but consider wartime.
- mlindner 4y agoThreats that are few in number and great in number are handled by different sorts of countermeasures. If China really did flood the west in balloons, then alternate measures would be used to handle it, perhaps measures that aren't public. High altitude balloons are very fragile (you need to wear gloves to avoid getting oils on them because those can dissolve the balloon material causing them to prematurely burst). I'm sure there's many counter measures that could be used if needed.
- BrotherBisquick 4y agoI wonder why they didn't just use 20mm.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> I wonder why they didn't just use 20mm. Canada tried that once, with poor results. https://news.yahoo.com/weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-161314996.html https://news.yahoo.com/weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-161...
- shrimp_emoji 4y agoReal footage of the interception: https://youtu.be/Zb03buggCcw?t=1596 https://youtu.be/Zb03buggCcw?t=1596
- sabujp 4y agoF22 service ceiling 50k ft, M61A2 vulcan 20mm effective range 2000ft, balloon was at 60k ft
- hstaab 4y agoThose 20mm will land… somewhere
- HybridCurve 4y agoCeiling for F-22 is 'above 50k' feet. I think the balloon was at 60k.
- colonCapitalDee 4y agoAre you serious? This is like looking at a F1 car and going "oh yeah, that's super cheap. Go carts only cost a couple thousand dollars". DoD says that the payload of the balloon is as long as three buses lined up end to end. The balloon itself is likely bigger than many office buildings. A state of the art sensor suite is going to run in the millions. Claiming you can get all that for sub 50k is laughable.
- IAmGraydon 4y agoWhat's your point? We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs? You don't understand why that's ridiculous?
- foverzar 4y ago> We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs Yes?.. > You don't understand why that's ridiculous? No?.. Don't you understand how the cost of action is the base of military economy? This is hardly a military decision, it's purely a PR decision.
- adeelk93 4y agoIn a war of attrition, yes, but this is a one-off. It’s not purely PR, I am sure the primary motivation is actually counterintelligence, which is why they are recovering it over shallow water.
- foverzar 4y ago> which is why they are recovering it over shallow water. They shot the payload with a missile over the sea. What's there to recover?
- IAmGraydon 4y agoIt's you who doesn't understand. We don't care how much the target costs. We care about how much not taking it down can cost us. We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless. We send a message that Chinese aircraft that violate our airspace and leave in tact. If data was stored onboard, it's possible that we prevented a large cache of surveillance data from making it back to China. So that $400,000 missile had a benefit that is hard to quantify, but is easily in the multiple millions of dollars. Your argument makes no sense. Let's say a sniper is in a building and is about to fire on a high value target. Before he can fire, we hit that building with a missile to take him out. According to you, we paid $400,000 to take out a sniper and his $1 bullet. The truth is that we spent $400,000 to protect a high value asset that may have been worth far more.
- Ancapistani 4y agoWhy would they use an AIM-9X? This is the kind of thing guns are for.
- adeelk93 4y agoIt was the size of 195 Goodyear blimps, and bigger than a football field. I imagine bullets would do nothing to it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/02/03/busting-that-chinese-balloon-is-harder-than-you-think/?sh=5e6c69ca7d6a https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/02/03/bustin...