The balloon was very high in the upper atmosphere, above normal commercial airline flight and above the reach of helicopters. If balloon pulling is a regular o

The balloon was very high in the upper atmosphere, above normal commercial airline flight and above the reach of helicopters. If balloon pulling is a regular occurrence you can set up infrastructure for it. Devise some different approaches and test them to see what works. If they waited that long, the balloon would have drifted out of US territory and the politics of downing an object over international waters would have been very sketchy. So yes, it's probably possible to engineer a solution to down a balloon using some non-destructive method, but there simply wasn't time to test it out and figure out what works.