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Balloons could be a clever counter to what the US is doing with Low Earth Orbit satellites recently. SpaceX is launching tons of spy/missile defense satellites
by georgeg23 4y ago
Balloons could be a clever counter to what the US is doing with Low Earth Orbit satellites recently.
SpaceX is launching tons of spy/missile defense satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
More details:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starshield_(satellite_constellation) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starshield_(satellite_constellati...
- analog31 4y agoSomething that puzzles me is how you specifically target China with a satellite. They can't be geostationary unless they're over the equator.
- ethanbond 4y agoLots and lots of satellites that keep passing overhead and you compose the images to abstract away the fact they came from multiple physical satellites. Idk how many companies/govs have this capability but: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/ https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/
- tomrod 4y agoPlanet.com. Maxar. Etc. CubeSats are cheap and effective.
- bboygravity 4y agoThere's only one company with that capability and that's the only organization in the world ever to achieve first stage (and soon all stage) reusability for LEO launches. Because to achieve that you need to put a lot of stuff in orbit and the only way to affordably do that is cheap (reusable) launches.
- ethanbond 4y agoI don't believe that's true. There are quite a few companies with tons of satellites in space. Walmart put up an array in 1987.
- sgt101 4y agoThe technical change is that you can build very useful, very small sats, which are cheap. Current SpaceX launch costs are lower, but like 1/2 price and 2x is not a big premium for a national security need.
- georgeg23 4y ago10x cost for Falcon 9 (actual internal cost) and 100x less for Starship when available..
- georgeg23 4y agoInteresting that Palantir video shows SpaceX dragon as an example of "integrating with existing satellites". Plantir's Thiel and Elon go way back...
- tough 4y agoThey don't call it the Paypal Mafia just cause
- georgeg23 4y agoPretty clear this guy is a key player in their mafia https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
- CPLX 4y ago> In 2002, Griffin was President and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests. During this time, he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs. They did what now?
- they4kman 4y agoYeah, so the lore goes, Musk just wanted to send humans to Mars, and had no intention, originally, to build his own rockets. The first tactic was to retool an ICBM for spacier spaceflight, but the Russians laughed them out of the country.
- paranoidrobot 4y agoIt was a simpler goal than that. From the first paragraph or two of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX > In August 2001, Musk shared a plenary talk with Mike Griffin at the fourth Mars Society convention where he announced his plans to send his greenhouse to Mars.[6] In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished Dnepr ICBMs that could send the envisioned payloads into space.[7]
- Redoubts 4y agoBut then it’s hard to claim that such a system is targeting any one specific place.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoFirst off, I don't buy the underlying premise because the US has been launching satellites with global coverage for 50 years... I don't see why China would wait until now to respond. But for your question, with LEO satellites you don't really target specific countries. They cover every country within a given latitude range. A round LEO orbit that goes over the US must also go over China. However you don't need geostationary orbits to target a given part of the globe. Molniya orbits do the same thing more or less and work better if you want coverage further away from the equator. They were popularized by the USSR and the US and China use them to varying extents.
- analog31 4y agoI had to look it up. It must have taken some impressive math work to invent that orbit in the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit
- georgeg23 4y agoThe SDA satellites are barely skimming Earth's atmosphere and may eventually take a more "active" role intercepting missiles and even targeting the ground, at least that's according to the SDA program's founder, https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/space-based-missile-defense-is-doable-dod-rd-chief-griffin/ https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/space-based-missile-defe...
- enkid 4y agoThey're targeting Chinese capabilities, not Chinese geography.
- analog31 4y agoSure, we're targeting Chinese capabilities that happen to be hovering over US geography.
- LarryMullins 4y agoIt can be done with highly eccentric and inclined geo-syncronized (not geostationary) orbits. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System#/media/File:Qzss-01-120s2.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System#...
- ianburrell 4y agoSpaceX has launched 8 Starshield satellites. Nobody knows what they do but they are probably testbeds for platform and space link communications. There are SDA launches planned for March and June. I wouldn't expect to see spy satellites from the SDA; the NRO has always controlled those. I could believe small spy satellites if launched from NRO. There haven't been any details on how missile defense will work from space with small satellites. The descriptions I've seen have been about communication and detecting hypersonic weapons with infrared sensors. The latter is not what I would think of as spy satellite or missile defense.
- georgeg23 4y agoThose links give a lot more information.
- lost_tourist 4y agoI highly doubt is the US government doesn't know what they do, it's just the public that doesn't know.
- m4jor 4y agoI'd reckon this. The US government knows exactly what is going on up there at all times and most likely has the most advanced spying satellites and capabilities out of all countries. The NRO has been doing this since the 60s! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office >In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope. I had a retired intel guy at DEFCON tell me the imagery is so advanced they could zoom in on a coin on the ground and tell if it was heads or tails.
- Nevermark 4y agoPresumably we have telescopic tech that could do much much better than that, but at some point the field of view would become near microscopic too
- 4y ago
- moose_man 4y agoChina could do the same thing if they wanted. That isn't a good excuse to violate national airspace. Maybe they want to intercept cell phone data.
- blindriver 4y agoThey have Huawei equipment is almost every cell tower installation to do that already.
- moose_man 4y agoMaybe some of the poorer networks have residual 3G equipment, but in general, the US has been cracking down on Huawei for a decade. They don't have a huge presence in the US.
- Arubis 4y agoWhat’s the service life on such equipment? Sales of new Huawei telecom equip have been banned outright in the US for a couple months. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-equipment-sales-imports-zte-huawei-over-national-security-risk-2022-11-25/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-e...
- PeterisP 4y agoDecades. Some hardware failure happens, but it's not that frequent, if it's like previous generations of cell technology, most of it will run until the operator chooses to shut down that particular service e.g. switching to a newer generation and freeing up the spectrum for it.
- Aloha 4y agoEven with Huawei equipment fieled (which there isnt much left, Cricket and Clearwire were the largest incumbents for it, and those networks are gone) the BTS does not have network access to phone home, they're walled off with very very very non-routable IP's (as in stuff used on the pubic internet) - there are too many layers of access control for what was being alleged to work in a practical sense.
- sgt101 4y agoAlternatively (if they need a counter) they could launch LEO satellites themselves?
- ge96 4y agoSide note, the Chinese satellite (according to news) that did laser testing over Hawaii was visually pretty neat
- localplume 4y agoSurveillance satellites are very different to directly flying this equipment into US airspace, including the fact that this equipment could hold paylods other than ISR. Not to mention this comment implies China does not have equivalent spy satellites, which it does. Also the UN is an absolute joke. That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS. Also forgetting about China's [ASAT test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengyun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengyun) which has been the worst in history.
- gambiting 4y ago>>Also the UN is an absolute joke UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
- handedness 4y agoThe UN is certainly something more than that, and not literally just a forum. They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example: "Consider a small sample of heinous cases: in April 2016 Foreign Policy reported that, in the Central African Republic, a French commander tied up four girls and forced them to have sex with a dog. Soldiers from France, Gabon, and Burundi sexually abused at least 108 women and children in a single province. In July 2015, The Washington Post reported that peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with over 229 women and girls in exchange for food, medicine, or other necessities. "Most recently, it was published in the The Washington Post in February 2016 that ‘four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as young as 13 as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex in a different camp for the internally displaced’ and ‘as many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomised six boys ages nine to 15’." https://www.ibanet.org/article/CEBC5F69-A238-49BB-B85A-5E8D878FE485 https://www.ibanet.org/article/CEBC5F69-A238-49BB-B85A-5E8D8... I'm guessing if one lived in any of the areas mentioned above, the UN would feel about as much like an invading force as just about anything. The UN as a peacekeeping force was a great concept, but it's had a very mixed history when put into practice. But it exists, so many people expect it to be a solution to their problems.
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- martyvis 4y agoActually this morning I was thinking about the inaugural and hopefully successful flight of Starship maybe next month. While it is meant to demonstrate capability to orbit, it won't complete it and is intended to crash land off the coast of Hawaii. I think it will be passing over China to achieve that. Maybe they would like interpret it as effectively an ICBM test - and by allowing these balloons to be shot down gives them some sort of tit-for-tat justification to bring down Starship earlier than Elon (and NASA, FAA, etc) would like. (Some sort of MAD muscle flexing) Here is the submitted flight plan https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481 https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
- georgeg23 4y agoStarship will make Brilliant Pebbles a real possibility and China knows it.
- dirtyid 4y agoIMO why PRC/RU going for glide hypersonics instead of ballistic. PRC's primary concern with spacex is hogging all the orbital slots.
- postmeta 4y agoThat flight plan doesn't indicate flying over China does it, more like Africa? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2W788nSjJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2W788nSjJ4
- martyvis 4y agoOK. I was trying to find a full flight plan, and was thinking it might swing down from the North before it got to Hawaii
- beambot 4y agoMind you, Google was flying hundreds of high-altitude balloons at one point too via the now-defunct Project Loon: https://x.company/projects/loon/ https://x.company/projects/loon/ Rather than being all secretive, it would be just as easy to blame some new upstart company being a little more cavalier than Google.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoGoogle was pretty open about their balloons. As far as I know, no one in China has taken responsibility for the balloon, or at least provided a plausible story behind it. They are leaving everything up to our imagination, which is a lot during an otherwise boring week.