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>This seems like conjecture. It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
by serf 4y ago
>This seems like conjecture.
It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
Unless this balloon -- or whatever it was -- was diamond-bedazzled and platinum-plated and filled with alien technology it's a safe bet that it was a fair amount cheaper to produce/launch/maintain than sortieing one of the most expensive and exclusive modern aircraft in the world and shooting off a missile that costs 600k/ea -- and that's not even considering collateral costs associated to the action.
- arcticfox 4y agoRight, but presumably F-22s need to fly and pilots need to shoot down things with live ammo occasionally anyways to stay in shape? And logistics needs to know how to supply, and intelligence needs to know how to scramble them etc. This seems like what amounts to a training program to me, unless a lot more start coming.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoI don’t think that’s really such a good bet. The first one was supposedly the size of multiple buses. That is a bunch of computer hardware held up by a balloon rather than “just a balloon”. The price of such a thing could easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware, let alone any associated R&D costs. That’s all before bringing up that the person I quoted claimed off-hand that it’s an order of magnitude difference. They’re probably rather similar in cost.
- ilyt 4y agoBig complex one-off things are expensive. Anything needing bus-sized solar array gonna have some fancy equipment on board. All of that needs engineering to not fail at the temperature range up above and code to make it do what is needed