Looks to have around 16x300W solar panels, so roughly 4.8KW. A lot but no unreasonable given it has 4 electric turbines and it would take a lot of grunt to influence a balloon of that size especially given air density altitude.
If it is a civilian craft it's either government or maybe one of the big Chinese universities.
Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks to be Ku-band satellite or similar) but it also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites.
I don't think it's obvious what the purpose is. It's clearly very large, probably reasonably pricey. The platform alone has ~100k of solar on it, probably another 80k in propulsion, power systems and connectivity.
By no means is it outside the means of civilian agencies or even private companies in China. Given the cost of high resolution civilian aerial imagery this actually looks pretty compelling vs aircraft or satellite (which lack the resolution of normal aerial photography platforms).
The other thing is that it stands to reason is that if you build this thing, regardless of it's purpose it's going to circle the Earth pretty much no matter what. Except if you deliberately down it of course. A balloon this big, up this high isn't coming down and that propulsion system isn't going to have enough authority to choose which continent you fly over.
Anyways, super interesting. Maybe we see legit commercial implementations of this sort of platform in the coming years though it seems like it will be good fun trying to register these with all the various airspace it will inevitably fly through if you launch it.
If I recall details of this story as it was breaking - there was an emphasis that the US tried repeatedly to communicate with counterparts in China to discern the nature of the balloon and cool the situation. From memory, the Chinese side refused to engage on any level... which ultimately led to the balloon being shot down.
The Chinese are advanced - there's no chance they couldn't/didn't monitor a balloon of this size launching into their airspace. There's no chance they do not know the true origin and owner of the balloon.
If it were civilian/private and/or university - this would have been easy to explain and prove. The balloon may have still ultimately been downed (it was violating airspace regardless of who owns it) - but the situation would have gone rather differently.
Didn't some analysis say the balloon likely deployed from Latin America? If it was a Chinese university it's strange we don't have a 3rd country involved yet. Unless it came off a warship or Cuba or something.
It's impossible to tell from looking at it in a photo taken from that distance what band a parabolic aimed (pan/tilt motorized) geostationary satellite antenna of that type is. Unless you're close enough to measure the diameter of the feed horn. Small size means it's unlikely to be C-band as not enough gain unless you want to waste a huge section of transponder space at BPSK modulation and ultra low bps/Hz ratio. It could be X, Ku, high Ku, Ka, etc.
Also extremely likely a craft like that has L/S-band more omnidirectional low data rate command and control radio talking to something in orbit. Basically same idea as L/S-band Inmarsat but operated on military satellites. Obviously the Chinese government won't be using Iridium.
Somewhere I think there are also some laid off ex Google Loon project engineers who are having a good laugh about this whole thing.
Is this something like what you guys would have built if given a mission statement as "spent a few million dollars to build a really long endurance platform, cost is no object" ?
Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity [...] but it also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites.
Balloons aren't "bad satellites" or "poor-man's satellites." Satellites and balloons each have different things that they are good at.
I was wondering if this might be able to xmit for any number of reasons, from fake cell tower to other kinds, maybe even a numbers station function.
Certainly the altitude differential and ease of navigation (presumed, mostly due to balloon having propellers vs. satellites having either much more costly navigation or none) raise this question.
>Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks to be Ku-band satellite or similar) but it also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites.
Two things. It will be significantly better at ELINT, soaking up signals over which it floats. Second, at 60,000 feet it is at least an order of magnitude closer than LEO spy satellites are, if not more. Simple physics dictates the limits of resolution for the lenses for spy satellites. Being significantly closer makes it much easier to provide better images than a multi billion dollar spy satellite. All at a significantly lower cost.
This bears repeating. Physics dictates that atmosphere effects means a spy satellite, operating from the edge of space, will never be able to resolve the license plate of a car. A balloon, at 60,000 feet, roughly 18 km (space is at 100 km) can. If you're China, and you want high resolution aerial photography of US nuclear missile silos in Montana, this is what you'd use.
We've been at the limit since the 70's, btw. The Hubble space telescope was enabled by the spy satellite program - they didn't just "happen" to have an extra mirror of exactly the right size, they made them for spy satellites.
Good question. The answer is no for three primary reasons. First, the JWST isn't designed for observing Earth, so its equipment isn't optimized for that purpose. Second, spy sats are already at the limits of what physics will allow them to see. And third, the JWST is much farther from our planet than spy sats. The atmosphere blurs signals.
That’s true but it assumes it can get within ~40 miles as the crow flies of an interesting target, even then you are going through a LOT more dense atmosphere for your photos.
It's an optics problem. Most of the scattering when looking down is near the objects because that's where the turbulence and air density. Looking sideways has to go through all of that - it's dense, uniform, and turbulent in comparison to the atmosphere above a point.
Another way to reframe this is that you would get a higher resolution looking at an object 100 miles down from space then you'd get looking at an equivalent object 100 miles up.
(Keyhole satellites are at 200 miles.)
Of course, knowing when satellites are above you is a bit easier to know and prepare for (the governments usually know where sophisticated adversarial satellites are). The smaller satellites I think are quite a bit higher - 300 miles - so the balloon can probably beat them provided it can get with 100 miles (even though there's a lot of those).
Funny you mention that because Trump gave away USA-224’s optics capability. You can understand from that photo the kind of resolution you can get from space (during the middle of the day, in August, in a desert - no less).
$100k of solar? 360w panels are sub-$300 at full retail prices. So that's under $5k of panels (unless you're including batteries in the calculation, but even then, it's maybe $10k).
That is house solar panels. For a craft like this you are using aerospace materials. If you were building it in your backyard yeah, you could probably do it cheap but my experience with commercial grade aerospace components makes me think you are going to be in for sticker shock.
I highly doubt they're using aerospace-grade solar panels. If they were installing them on a permanent satellite, sure, but this is on a presumably disposable balloon. Even accounting for higher solar radiation and degradation of the panels, the lifespan of regular terrestrial panels should be plenty sufficient.
I’m unfamiliar with solar panels in this application, but would each panel really be $6,250? That’s >20x premium over panels used for terrestrial application for use on a platform that would have little dynamic load.
I’d have thought the aerospace or satellite grade panels, struts and mounting systems they’d be more likely to use would be quite a bit more expensive.
What could this balloon collect that any regular jet couldn't? I don't think the government is transmitting secrets over such a wide open medium. Anything broadcast over radio should be assumed to be public knowledge.
A jet is more conspicuous and arguably a bigger offense, China also does not have jets with the required range or service ceiling.
SIGINT is valuable even if you can’t decrypt the contents, in fact when you can it’s usually COMMINT.
SIGINT provides you with other valuable information such as frequencies used, cadence and also allows you to uncover new locations of forces and installations.
Also governments still use a lot of unencrypted or partially encrypted communications - cellphones are a great example even if voice and data is encrypted the cell ID and other valuable metadata isn’t.
No I'm saying anything broadcast over such an easily intercepted medium is almost certainly not useful. (Either encrypted or information that is not secretive.)
If it really was a signal intelligence balloon, I don't see what it could possibly learn.
Encryption makes signals intelligence more difficult, not impossible. It is and has always been a game of cat and mouse.
There is still a lot you can learn from analyzing encrypted signals. The metadata itself may be quite valuable, and any world power undoubtedly does cryptanalysis.
Wouldn't there also be a benefit from knowing, for example, that there's a bunch of encrypted radio chatter on a military frequency coming from a rural Montana town with a population of 500? Even without knowing anything that's being said, it might indicate a military presence in that location.
HAARP [0] was built in 1993, and its often been accused of being able to incite tectonic response from the Earth. Obviously, this is the tinfoil... but for a couple decades HAARP has been blamed for earthquakes.
What I find interesting in this, is that with the "spy balloons", aside from the one which was shot down over the Atlantic, after 'passing through' Alaska and then across the US is supposedly "Chinese"...
The other balloons were shot down over Alaska, and over Billings.
Interestingly, both HAARP and the other balloons for weather tracking are from University Fairbanks. (and there has been a lot of posts recently for the strength of the Aurora - such as the super bright one yesterday from Alaska which made the entire night and snow glow strong green color)
>>"The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emit light of varying colour and complexity."
--
Now for the core of the conspiracy ; If HAARP can cause earthquakes through the interactions between the Ionosphere, or the beam pointing from bouncing waves off the Ionosphere, it would be interesting if that activity was being measured/tracked through the balloons that they use to measure aspects of the Ionosphere, and the blowing up of the balloons was to destroy the evidence of tracking and monitoring the effects of 3.6 Million Watt beams being shot up from multiple locations, and converging on the same point. Its interesting that we have Earthquake Lights - where the atmosphere above a major earthquake will light up the sky just prior to the EQ, kind of like sheet lightning, due to the changes in ionization. (and recall, there are treaties that were signed (supposedly) decades ago banning weather-warfare...
There was a 6.4 again in Turkey today, more building collapsed, but were apparently building that were already damaged in the previous.
So if we could look into the correlation between very strong Aurora, EQs, and when/if one of the HAARP installations was active at the time... (look at the wiki for the image of the activity bands:
Notice that "high activity" is the RED band, which is closest to Turkey's region... and then look at this path of the chinese balloon, which roughly follows the path of the bands in the Aurora output:
There are also patents related to using HAARP to send ULF both into the atmosphere and into the ground... (see patents below)
So, I find it interesting to correlation (not causation) for massive geological event (a 1 in 1,000 year series of earthquakes in Turkey - in a swarm where typically each of the earthquakes by themselves would still be considered massive, and more than 60,000 people have died so far (the current official number claimed by MSM is 45,000 - but there are thousands who were recovered and buried without being added to the tally, as well as thousands of bodies that were pulverized and wont be discovered for a time, if at all)
I am not saying this is how it is, I am just saying I find all these coincidences odd...
Obviously turkey is basically bordered by tectonic boundaries ; the timing of everything is bizarre.
> Satellites are highly predictable and things can be tucked neatly away when they’re known to be overhead.
And the same can't be said for a balloon which flies wherever the wind takes it? Does China think NORAD is a joke or that we're incapable of modelling weather patterns?
> And the same can't be said for a balloon which flies wherever the wind takes it?
It doesn't fly wherever the wind takes it. It is designed to move vertically between air layers to whichever layer has wind blowing in the direction it wants to go, and it has turbines to steer itself a little bit on top of that, that's why it's got almost 15kw of solar power onboard. You can literally maneuver the thing in a box-shaped pattern between those air currents and make it hold position over a target area, or at least you can try. Google was doing this a decade ago and it works pretty well.
> Much like hot air balloon pilots would do to get from place-to-place, these unmanned balloons ride global wind currents like rivers, climbing, and sinking to find the right flow to get to a destination. Google’s computers take weather data from NOAA and determine which current they need to hitch a ride on to reach their destinations. The balloons can only go up or down.
> also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites. I don't think it's obvious what the purpose is.
Don't believe the spy angle that much.. maybe this is not about what its purpose is right now, but what it might quickly need to be at some point.. imagine nations start shooting their satellites, orbit becomes unhabitable, and you still want to go spying.. or just replace your satellite based comms network!
Buy an apartment in some Highrise for best reception. Anonymously register it to a shell company based in a tax heaven. UV Gov will think this is 'legal' tax evasion just like thousands of landlords.
Put any equipment you want inside generic chest on a balcony.
Ship the equipment in, inside an unsuspecting container, on a container ship from China headed for the US. Send two spys in as tourists. Have them rent a truck, pick up the equipment, and just drive it around in target areas.
For a balloon yes, generally speaking most balloons that can reach this altitude are weather balloons which are launched commonly but are cheap and disposable.
This platform is an order of magnitude larger and more capable than a normal weather balloon and thus much more expensive.
The full twitter thread is worth a read (https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1628776107301273601). Brings to mind the story in December 2022 about confirming the B-21 hangar location from the night sky in a press photo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33912401). Not enough of the sky for that here though. Wonder if folks in this space have a more automated process to recognize the landscape rather than "Hella scrolly scrolly on Google Earth"...
Publish it widely enough and someone will recognise the terrain (especially with things like reservoirs visible).
To automate it, trace the outline of bodies of water and compare to public data, e.g. SRTM [0]? Lots more detail (and a good jumping-off point) on the wikipedia 'Imagery Intelligence' page [1].
Cool photo, but it's ironic that an alleged spy balloon is being monitored from a spy plane. There's public outcry over China spying on the US, yet this same plane has been used to spy on many other countries for decades now. It's much more sophisticated, and not even state-of-the-art anymore.
This whole story feels sensationalized, and like a diversion tactic.
The plane was at 70,000 feet, the balloon at 60,000. So that's about 2 miles below. My cellphone does not take photos that good from 2 miles away, how about yours? So no, not a cellphone.
The U2 plane travels at about 500 mph and can't change that. (Look up "coffin corner" for why.) So even once you carefully place it to cast the shadow just right from 2 miles away, you have less than 0.2 seconds to get the photo with the plane's shadow placed on the balloon.
I can photograph the ground from a commercial airplane window, so yes my phone can take pictures of things much further than 2 miles away. Distance from the subject isn’t really all that important provided it’s big enough, lit well and you can focus to infinity.
The timing is tricky but 2/10 of a second isn’t an unthinkably brief window for snapping a photo, and if you use burst capture it’s trivial.
> The plane was at 70,000 feet, the balloon at 60,000.
It was quite a bit closer. Just look at the sizes of various things in that photograph (the length of the plane's shadow vs. the length of the wingtip, both those vs the diameter of the balloon, etc.). If you read 70,000 somewhere, that's because they were quoting the plane's service ceiling.
Pro-tip, Android phones can usually take a photo by double-pressing power and then using volume up or down as shutter button. Works without unlocking, easy to do with gloves on or in the dark.
Given that we often see USAF pilot selfies online, it's clearly allowed at (special?) times. But as others have said, this was probably asked specifically for PR reasons.
I haven't seen the new Top Gun, but I do remember a scene from the old one where they took a polaroid camera along with them in the cockpit. I don't know how realistic that was, but it seems plausible. Certainly I know of tons of soldiers who carried personal cameras to Iraq back in the day. You'd think a U-2 would be pretty locked down as far as what pilots are allowed to have, but it wasn't exactly a super secret mission over a foreign country either.
DOD has a bunch of PR teams. If a commander wants a photo from a mission and said photo passes review, it can be released. Check out some of the Air Force's excellent public photos here: https://www.af.mil/News/Photos/
“We do know from US military officials that the balloon itself was around 60 metres in height and that the payload was around the size of a “regional jet” such as the Embraer ERJ, which varies between 26 metres and 30 metres in length. The payload is thought to have weighed around 900 kilograms.” [1]
Edit: the photo linked in another comment provided a much better shot of the panels. There seem to be 48 panels oriented horizontally in packs of 3. So we are looking at probably 48x300W = 14kW of power.
ordinary commercially available terrestrial solar panels (which are heavy when built into glass front panel and backing sheet + aluminum frame), made from high efficiency monocrystalline si cells are commonly maxing out like:
60 x 6W 156mm cells = 360W STC rating
72 x 6W 156mm cells = 430W STC rating or around there.
If they used triple junction GaAs cells or something exotic like you'd see on a satellite it could be something very different.
The same mono Si cells could be used in something built to be fragile and light weight for attaching to a giant balloon.
If it's something thin film the efficiency is probably less.
It's theoretically possible to get up there in a manned balloon, but this was up at FL600. Most aircraft can't even go that high. It's not something that's done casually.
Going up to those altitudes is the domain of either the military or someone trying to set a record. It's not a forgiving environment - you basically need a space suit up there. I'm fairly confident that nobody has the equipment for such a mission sitting around ready for use on short notice, especially if you want to stay up there for any length of time before you run out of air.
As for base jumping... uh, gravity points in the wrong direction for that. This is twice as high as Mt. Everest.
Your comment reminded me of something I saw in grade-school that was probably the biggest inspiration in sticking with USASA (Red Bull is a long-time sponsor) for so long.
Red Bull Stratos: 'A high altitude skydiving project'
- Baumgartner flew approximately 39 kilometres (24 mi) into the stratosphere over New Mexico, United States, in a helium balloon before free falling in a pressure suit and then parachuting to Earth.
- Baumgartner broke the unofficial record for the highest manned balloon flight of 37,640 m (123,491 ft)
Even if it can attributed to a "civilian" company, China is not a free country under Xi Jin Ping's rule. The CCP has many mechanisms to control the Chinese private sector as an arm of the state.
Xi Jin Ping exercises more control over Chinese society than Stalin could have dreamed of in the Soviet Union, with the various coercive systems put into place in the last few decades.
This is a bit absurd, xi absolutely wouldn't be able to go ahead with purges similar to those of Stalin in 1937, even if he wanted to. He simply doesn't have the authority to do so. The chinese politburo is a much much more complicated beast than the usual stereotype of a powerless puppet of an all powerful dictator, that tons of people in the west seem to think it is.
Let's not forget that Xi just publicly purged any remaining factions in the politburo that could have opposed him. Xi has more power in China than Mao ever had. Even under Mao, it took years before opposition factions had the ability to end the cultural revolution. Xi could easily crush any opposition to his rule, and already has. There's no need for a cultural revolution or a mass assassination campaign, he's already won. There is no opposition faction of any significant size.
And Chinese society is actively being sculpted using modern propaganda techniques on social media to be hyper nationalistic and hate the US/west. This is far more powerful than what Stalin ever had at his disposal.
It works much the same in the US, both related to secret control of major industry (see FAA702 etc) and "various coercive systems" enabled by the IC's surveillance and offensive tools.
Possibly but I could see a university or research organization constructing this. “Civilian” is a broad umbrella. My hunch is it’s not though and the Chinese got embarrassed.
This is the only picture of the balloon fully intact that exists
The reason we sent a U2 Spy plane of all things after it is because it’s about the only plane we have still in service that can fly all the way up to 60,000 ft where the balloon was at the time
> This is the only picture of the balloon fully intact that exists.
There are almost certainly much better pictures. This is just the pilot's selfie. The U-2 is built to take pictures. USAF: "The U-2 is capable of gathering a variety of imagery, including multi-spectral electro-optic, infrared, and synthetic aperture radar products which can be stored or sent to ground exploitation centers. In addition, it also supports high-resolution, broad-area synoptic coverage provided by the optical bar camera producing traditional film products which are developed and analyzed after landing. The U-2 also carries a signals intelligence payload."
Just to take a selfie? The cynic in me thinks the DoD would totally value a photo-op enough to do this.
I’m not a jingoistic person but even I felt a tinge of awe and American pride when I saw the photo. The U2 is cool, and this photo depicts the US as in control of the situation in a way that we didn’t feel when this thing was in the news.
> The reason we sent a U2 Spy plane of all things after it is because it’s about the only plane we have still in service that can fly all the way up to 60,000 ft where the balloon was at the time
Additionally, flying high requires flying fast, generally.
The U2's huge wingspan allows it to fly much slower at these altitudes, and with much more ease and efficiency than say, an F-15 or F-22 as some other commenters have suggested being capable of shadowing the balloon at FL600+.
The F-22 service ceiling is 60,000 ft so it can get up there too. The U2, however, flies relatively slow (< 400 kn) at that altitude so is ideal for an up-close inspection.
I would think that the U2 internal cameras were designed for a long focal length and for objects below the aircraft. I wonder if they made modifications for balloon photos.
The U2 contains a far more advanced sensor suite than just cameras. With something like this balloon I suspect the signals intelligence is at least as interesting as any visual reconnaissance.
> When the U.S. government learned of Powers's disappearance over the Soviet Union, they lied that a "weather plane" had strayed off course after its pilot had "difficulties with his oxygen equipment". What CIA officials did not realize was that the plane crashed almost fully intact and that the Soviets had recovered its pilot and the plane's equipment, including its top-secret high-altitude camera.
That was a specialty pre-production version of the F15 that was modified to do basically just altitude and speed records. It never entered operational service.
The service ceiling is published as FL650. That’s defined as being able to sustain a 100fpm climb, so the absolute level flight ceiling is somewhat higher than that. Service ceiling figure is not in a zoom climb.
It would easily suffice to engage a balloon at FL600.
the venerable english electric lightning (RAF) intercepted a u2 at 66k feet during a nato exercise under full control. it also made it to 86K feet, but that was a zoom climb, and the pilot seems to have found the experience rather scary.
It's an interesting plane to use when considering the USSR shot down a U-2 in 1960. This history even rhymes: the US initially claimed the U-2 was a weather device like China did with this balloon.
Maybe they weren't just surveilling, but actually attacking cell networks and/or mobile phones through a vulnerability that requires line-of-sight. Just speculation though.
Could also just be a distraction from something else they were up to at the same time.
> Maybe they weren't just surveilling, but actually attacking cell networks and/or mobile phones through a vulnerability that requires line-of-sight. Just speculation though.
Wouldn't it be easier to get LOS to all the same targets without drawing attention to yourself via something like a car or a normal airplane?.
What sort of attack? Like stealing data? Or something else that you wouldn’t pick up on? Because attack sounds like you are degrading performance or something, in which case we (or someone) would know about it.
<mode: conspiracy>
One attack could be a RF receiver in any of the Huawei cell towers or networking equipment to accept a signal to start someone.
</mode>
it sounds like an outrageous opening scene from an 80's movie...
I was hoping for a Google Earth link to the same perspective (altitude, position, camera angle) as the one shown in the selfie. I didn't find one in the article, or in the comments here (yet!)
I started working on it, but don't have the patience at the moment. Anyone else give it a shot?
What can this thing take a picture of that isn't already on google earth? Literally. I mean there's a small chance it floats over area 51 or something like it, but that's slim.
I know the whole “land shouldn’t vote” thing is used to criticize the electoral college, but within the state what exactly are you referring to? I can’t think of any mechanism that wouldn’t be a simple tyranny of the majority but it sounds like you’re implying something more sinister.
I mainly mean that Missouri is a super Red state despite the majority of the population being liberal. They just all live in the 3-4 counties that comprise the St. Louis and Kansas City areas, and Republicans in power use all the usual tricks to disenfranchise more liberal voters. Compared to, say, Seattle/WA, voting in Missouri is clearly designed to make it hard for "certain types" of people to have a say in their governance.
(Plus, yeah, I don't like the "land shouldn't vote" part of the electoral college either).
I lived for a long time in Missouri, and... I'm not sure how you got the idea the majority of the population is liberal.
I don't see how there's any gerrymandering that could lead to the senators and governors being so consistently Republican since 2016 (and I'm pretty confident McCaskill would've lost in 2012 if Akin hadn't made his "legitimate rape" comments).
I agree that Missouri's house representation is heavily skewed by gerrymandering, if that's what you meant.
is there c code running in that baloon? with dependency to stdlib, possibly compiled with gcc or clang? did they use vim to write the code for it? can they ssh to it? what kind of code is running there? I'm soo curious!!
Looks to have around 16x300W solar panels, so roughly 4.8KW. A lot but no unreasonable given it has 4 electric turbines and it would take a lot of grunt to influence a balloon of that size especially given air density altitude.
If it is a civilian craft it's either government or maybe one of the big Chinese universities.
Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks to be Ku-band satellite or similar) but it also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites.
I don't think it's obvious what the purpose is. It's clearly very large, probably reasonably pricey. The platform alone has ~100k of solar on it, probably another 80k in propulsion, power systems and connectivity.
By no means is it outside the means of civilian agencies or even private companies in China. Given the cost of high resolution civilian aerial imagery this actually looks pretty compelling vs aircraft or satellite (which lack the resolution of normal aerial photography platforms).
The other thing is that it stands to reason is that if you build this thing, regardless of it's purpose it's going to circle the Earth pretty much no matter what. Except if you deliberately down it of course. A balloon this big, up this high isn't coming down and that propulsion system isn't going to have enough authority to choose which continent you fly over.
Anyways, super interesting. Maybe we see legit commercial implementations of this sort of platform in the coming years though it seems like it will be good fun trying to register these with all the various airspace it will inevitably fly through if you launch it.