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Airspace over Lake Michigan restricted due to national defense
- nobaddays 4y agoIsnt this the 4th incident in like a week? Seems like its actually a routine occurence but the media is choosing to fixate/overreport it after the spy baloon. Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line
- Spooky23 4y agoIt’s a tit for tat escalation. The Russians do the same thing with bombers. The difference is this is a novel event so people are freaking out a bit. Key thing is to let it play out and not get freaked out by theatrical political people.
- jboggan 4y agoThese kind of NOTAMs are not routine, especially when they coincide with actual shootdowns.
- chasd00 4y agoIt could be a test but is there any doubt worldwide that, of all branches of the US military, the US Air Force is the last thing you want to tangle with?
- onion2k 4y agoIf you're correct then whoever (or whatever!) is behind these objects is either stupid or absolutely terrifying.
- gota 4y agoI don't know about stupid. If you can spend X dollars to "force" your opponent to spend X*10 dollars it can be a viable strategy. I recall the reported costs of "junk rockets" vs those surface-to-air defenses, which I believe are a similar case of the attack being orders of magnitude cheaper than the defense
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoI looked it up, and an AIM 9X is just shy of a half a million dollars a unit.
- roflyear 4y agoSo we can shoot down 1m balloons before we have to worry about it?
- toss1 4y agoSure, that may be the initial ratio, but if it becomes a regular thing, as in sufficiently regular to strain one of our budgets beyond (substituting a few live target shootings for training exercises), we can rapidly develop an appropriate response. E.g., when there was a new bunker-buster bomb in the initial Iraq war, one was developed in 28 days. Similarly, the MOAB was developed in about a year. There are plenty of teams of highly skilled and well-equipped engineers who will happily undertake to solve that problem. Also, weapons systems with higher expected rates of use can benefit from economies of scale-ed up production. Unless they're sending a million balloons this week, it won't be that kind of problem.
- Fricken 4y agoIt seems like it takes far more resources to knock these balloons out of the sky than it does to set them adrift.
- pigbearpig 4y agoNo, it doesn't take "far more resources." All pilots, military or civilian, need to accumulate hours to stay current. Flying to investigate or shootdown a balloon isn't going to take more resources than ordinary training would. The recovery might be something else, but then again, those groups are constantly training anyway, so I'd venture to guess the difference is negligible.
- itake 4y agoAFAIK, even if these were routine, this is the first time anyone has actually seen one with the naked eye.
- yucky 4y agoThat's not realistic at all.
- space_fountain 4y agoI think policy shifted. I think overflights by balloons are routine. See as evidence reporting that the balloon that started this news cycle was number 4 in the past handful of years, but after the media attention a decision was made to have more of a zero tolerance policy
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoMy understanding was that we may have been filtering these objects out as noise of our sensor arrays, and only just started listening more closely for smaller anomalies. It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.
- cratermoon 4y agoMy money says yes, these are routine events. I don't blame the media, though, not directly. I blame the warmongers that have been pushing the anti-China line, starting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
- nop_slide 4y agoNumber 5 actually, there was a similar NOTAM last night over Montana.
- mzs 4y agoThe NOTAM itself: https://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4885.html https://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4885.html There was one for MT yesterday evening as well.
- remarkEon 4y agoNew one: https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/details https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/details Looks like it's over Lake Huron now?
- mzs 4y ago>Another high-altitude object was shot down Sunday, this time over Lake Huron, three U.S. officials confirmed to ABC News. According to one of the officials, the object was shot down by a U.S. military aircraft. >At 2:45 p.m., a U.S. Air Force F-16 fired a sidewinder missile at the objects, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday. >The Lake Huron object was an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernable payload. The official also said that there is no indication of surveillance capabilities but they cannot rule it out. … https://abc7chicago.com/lake-michigan-flight-restrictions-airspace-closed-department-of-defense/12804806/ https://abc7chicago.com/lake-michigan-flight-restrictions-ai...
- q1w2 4y agoI guess it's open season on spy balloons now that they have authorization to shoot them all down. I suspect both Russia and China were operating different model balloons for different mission types. What are your guesses on their purpose? If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
- Ccecil 4y agoAnd balloons have the option to loiter longer than say a satellite or other means. I assumed they were doing some sort of RF monitoring more than the photo type monitoring. A lot of the comments focus on "Why would they use balloons when they have satellites?" But the reality is they are cheaper, can be oriented inexpensively and can loiter. Not to mention the lower radar signal and other detection issues (made clear by the revelation that this has been going on for a while). Now that launching/steering balloons is down to the hobbyist level...it seems a larger corp or state actor could easily use them in a way that seemed impossible 30 years ago.
- to11mtm 4y ago> If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities). An interesting theory, although I would be at least a little worried if secure facilities did not already have some form detection of signals they do not expect. OTOH, you could instead have something gathering data, and the passing balloon could send a signal to the listening device(s), and then quickly dump+relay the data collected over time.
- vogt 4y agoAt least WRT the first balloon that kicked off all of this hubbub, NYTimes report that the State Department have disclosed it was "equipped with an antenna meant to pinpoint the locations of communications devices and was capable of intercepting calls made on those devices": https://www.nytimes.com/article/chinese-spy-balloon-mission.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/chinese-spy-balloon-mission....
- vecplane 4y agoHow many of these recent UFOs will turn out to be actual weather balloons?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago0
- serf 4y agothe public-at-large i'm exposed to seems to be more apt to assume they're aliens -- so frankly anyone that assumes it's just an innocuous weather balloon is a breath of fresh air for me.
- Maxious 4y agoActual weather balloons transmit on internationally agreed common frequencies https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/wmo-and-itu-update-radio-frequency-handbook https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/wmo-and-itu-update-radi... Amateur radio operators monitor these frequencies https://tracker.sondehub.org/ https://tracker.sondehub.org/
- koheripbal 4y agoAre balloons still used in weather forecasting anymore? I thought that ended with weather satellite.
- species9606 4y agoRelevant interview with Senator Schumer: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/3-objects-flying-us-canada-balloons-schumer-congress/story?id=97055660 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/3-objects-flying-us-canada-b... He's claiming they're all balloons, and that recovering them has been an intelligence windfall for the US - and Schumer would be in a position to know that. Then again, Schumer has seemed to have an obvious anti-China bias in recent years.
- vorpalhex 4y agoThis is a little bit like saying Ukraine has an anti-Russia bias. You're not wrong but the phrasing isn't aligned to the reality of the situation.
- CoolGuySteve 4y agoI suspect the language used by the USA/Canada concerning these devices is meant to obscure an uncomfortable truth. These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down. Instead of manning AWACS and defending them, China could flood the airspace with thousands of these balloons and it would be too expensive to take them all down with our current technology. By publicizing the F22 mission to shoot that balloon down, we kind of showed our hand and it's a really bad hand. Hence the obfuscating language now being used by officials on the matter.
- erredois 4y agoI agree, and I would add the Iranian drones also add to this new facet of war equipment. The really cheap, effective and hard to deal.
- eagleinparadise 4y agoGuess what, the US military will develop even better balloons in a short amount of time.. if it's so easy, cheap, and effective.
- molotovh 4y ago
- Waterluvian 4y agoMy “wild conspiracy theory” continues to be that this was a well-known part of mutual spying and was tolerated up until the Chinese screwed up and one was seen by civilians. Now the US has to act surprised, outraged, and responsive, and the whole thing that was being tolerated is being unwound. The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response. I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.
- pkaye 4y agoIf the US wanted mutual spying, it could have allowed Huawei to continue operating in the US.
- pyuser583 4y agoThis isn’t a conspiracy theory - it’s Occam’s Razor.
- superfrank 4y agoNo it isn't. Occam's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor) > when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires fewest assumptions Occam's razor would say that this is the first time we've noticed a balloon over the US, so we shot it down. Believing that there is an unspoken agreement between the US and China to allow a certain amount of spying and we're only taking a hard stance because the Chinese fucked up and got their balloon noticed by civilians has far more assumptions baked into it. ---- To be clear, I'm not saying the theory presented by OP is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not backed by Occam's Razor.
- pyuser583 4y agoOccams Razor is “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” - “Pieces ought not to be positioned without necessity.” You must you believe spy balloons are [always, sometimes, never] reported to the press, and the press [always, sometimes, never] reports them to the public, and the public [always, sometimes, never] reads the reports. These pieces are already in position. Do you really think “you ought not to position pieces without necessity” really favors “always” over sometimes? Likewise, there is evidence the air balloons fly over America more than the authorities recognize. What explanation has the fewest unnecessary parts: we have perfect tranferreance of knowledge from Air Force Intelligence to consumers of the press, or the phenomena are witnessing are normal and expected? Edit: I removed some parts I placed without necessity.
- grjscott 4y agoThere's a refueling tanker and reconnaissance plane in the vicinity currently. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae0655,ae11e6 https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae0655,ae11e6
- yabones 4y agoA plane with it's ID as "blocked" took off on a steep climb from near Sudbury ON and is headed in that direction as well. I'd imagine it's a CF-18 jet or something similar... https://www.flightradar24.com/BLOCKED/2f2cec50 https://www.flightradar24.com/BLOCKED/2f2cec50 Edit, Nope, just a guy flying to Sault St. Marie with his transponder misconfigured ;)
- dboreham 4y agoGround speed 110kts?
- jack_riminton 4y agoIs the fact that all of these sightings happening in the US not suggestive enough to be from one of the US’s enemies? Why would aliens solely target the US
- sambull 4y agoOnly one's testing stuff that might be a threat to them? "It is a feature of the present invention to provide a craft, using an inertial mass reduction device, that can travel at extreme speeds." https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
- pkaye 4y agoThere was one over Costa Rica.
- jack_riminton 4y agoSo another country on the western seaboard of the Americas i.e. a balloon from China that caught the wrong trade wind
- koheripbal 4y agoNo one thinks this is aliens except teenagers, Russian bots, and but cases
- jack_riminton 4y agoThe commenter above you disagrees!
- snickerbockers 4y agoI came close to launching a weather-balloon with some simple hobbyist sensors for a school project back in 2011 but my team ultimately ended up going with something much less ambitious. Now I'm a little horrified that we came so close to picking the weather balloon because I realize how irresponsible it would have been (although I'm still more horrified at how we were going to just assume the parachute works with no testing or understanding of wind currents; this thing could easily have killed somebody if we had made it and it went down over somebody's house or place of business or a highway). Another group at my school did actually end up picking the weather balloon project and it landed in a tree in Amish country in Pennsylvania after having been launched from northern VA (somewhat ironically, it was the only tree in a wide open farm of dozens of acres). I wonder how many hobby weather balloons there are up there every day?
- CyberDildonics 4y agoWeather balloons go up all the time, what does all of this have to do with the current story?
- dqpb 4y agoI wonder how ironic the tree landing actually is. Assuming a weather balloon doesn't land vertically, but drifts at low altitude for several miles, it probably acts as a kind of tree-finder.
- avsteele 4y agoPeople assuming these are all balloons: please explain why they shutting down airspace without a statement. If they think its a balloon, why not just say 'radar detected a probable balloon and we are shutting down airspace while it is being investigated.' Why was the incident over Alaska described as a metal cylinder or whatever if its another probably balloon? This doesn't make much sense.
- brookst 4y agoThe balloon provides the lift for an instrument payload.
- 2bitencryption 4y agoSo many theories floating around (pun intended?) Which is correct? * The balloons/objects are well known by intelligence agencies and generally tolerated for strategic reasons, but then one becomes visible to the naked eye by the general public, and the agencies must suddenly respond and pretend it's a brand new threat, because the news cycle operates on simplistic headlines. OR * This is an entirely new and surprising development, and now intelligence agencies are aggressively scanning airspace for more of these objects and taking them down. * These balloons/objects can't actually provide useful intelligence for China, but by sending them as sacrificial lambs and eliciting a military response, it sets the precedent for China to do the same for any US intrusion on their airspace. (This one could be combined with either of the above two) * The timing of these balloons corresponds to other intelligence happenings that the general public doesn't know about - i.e., there is something happening in the intelligence space between the US and China, and these balloons signal some message that the intelligence agencies of the US understand, but which the public does not know about. But, again, the news cycle and the voting public demands a response to what they understand, and they do not accept "Trust us, we're handling it behind the scenes" as an answer. End result, you get an F-22 shooting down a balloon, in a highly visible operation. It's unclear if this demonstration was directed more at China or for the voting public. One final note - we're talking about intelligence warfare between massively powerful nation states, which makes it tempting to theorize and hypothesis like I just did above. But possibly there is nothing much to think about, and the truth is exactly as it seems: China sent some balloons in a spy program of unknown scope, possibly to elicit this response or possibly not, and it became a political mishap for the current administration so it was forced to respond in a public display. And now the event has more implications for US political pundits and news cycles than it ever did for intelligence warfare between these two countries.
- trebligdivad 4y agoCould this be an image analysis advance? Perhaps someone through some machine learning at Planet labs or otherwise imaging satellite streams and got more than they expected?
- lgxz 4y agoSo many balloons? Shall we build a BaaS (Balloon as a Service) company?
- fIREpOK 4y agoWhere do you build them?
- ct520 4y agoIf I was China and I wanted to disrupt Space Development Agency plans over my country (go after and destroy low orbiting satellites). It would make sense to me to strategically provoke my opposition into being the bad guy (shooting down benign low orbiting stuff) setting a precedence so I may be free to "retaliate" with less recourse of public opinion.
- ecf 4y agoWW3 starts the moment China shoots down a whole satellite.
- daegloe 4y agoThere is a new congressionally funded office to identify UAPs and act in coordination with the military to defeat them: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3249317/dod-office-moving-ahead-in-mission-to-identify-anomalous-phenomena/ https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/32... This may be related to why we’re seeing more of these incidents being reported with interventions.
- fIREpOK 4y ago2000 blimps coming from Canada... each carying 1 gram of SARS... is it still safe to nuke them?
- csimon80 4y agoI'm curious, does anyone here have an understanding the kind of information gathering you can do from a balloon that you can't with a satellite? Is it a cost issue? A don't know how do it in a satellite issue? or maybe a tech/physics issue?