I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4 school busses.
I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story.
But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion?
I ask simply because a payload the length of 3-4 school busses (apparently 45 feet) would be quite large and the ballon itself much much larger than I was imagining
Judging from the videos that pan from the moon to the balloon: the balloon was about 3x smaller in the sky than the moon. Knowing the altitude of the balloon was 68,000 feet, we can fudge the distance from the observer to the balloon as 100,000 feet. Knowing the distance to the moon and the radius of the moon we can use like triangles to estimate that the balloon was ~285 feet across, +/- 20% for estimates.
Edit: updated the estimate. I got radius and diameter mixed up.
This is a clever method and I appreciate that you posted the Wolfram alpha link - always happy when people show their work and I did not realize that you could do things like include (diameter of moon) as variables with it. This is a nit, but if you're busting out an AI enhanced calculator there is no need to make a 40% rounding of 70K to 100k. I got ~200 ft across.
Indeed and trying to estimate how much someone panned across a clear blue sky with more than 20 degree precision isn't how I wanted to spend my Saturday. 80% of the answer for 20% of the effort.
What is real football? I've heard of association football (shortened to soccer by the British), rugby football, Australian rules football, American football and Canadian football but I've never heard of real football.
And which one of those do you figure "real football" refers to? Can you take a wild guess?
It's like saying "the real Albert Einstein", as opposed to good Albert Einstein the baker, who is a local celebrity because of his amazing Apfelstrudel.
I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.
I was wondering if there was perhaps another variant of football that I had not heard of called "real football" since there are so many different types. So if real football simply refers to football then why did the OP ask: "Which football? Real football or American football?" if it's apparently so obvious?
>And which one of those do you figure "real football" refers to? Can you take a wild guess?
You no doubt believe that Newton, Henry VIII, Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Canute, Arthur and Launcelot, and Boadicia 1) all played association football, 2) called it the one and only "football", and 3) all other "football" sports around the world are bastard versions of it.
The word "Football" dates from the 13th century. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_%28word%29> The sport of association football, no. While people have no doubt been kicking round things for entertainment for thousands of years, association football as a sport is no older than other football codes like American, rugby, Gaelic, and AFL; all date from the mid to late 19th century. That's why English-speaking countries have differing meanings for "football", because it refers to the most local popular football code *no matter what that is*. Let me repeat: Association football has no primacy, seniority, or priority here. It is not the "first sport" or "the elder sport" or the "original sport" among football codes.
>I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.
"Soccer" is a British English word c. 1889. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22633980> According to Stephen Szymanski of the University of Michigan, until 1980 "soccer" and "football" were interchangeably used in Britain <https://web.archive.org/web/20140627210952/ns.umich.edu/Rele...>, when "soccer" became less popular because of a mistaken belief that it is an Americanism. The word still is in use in Britain; see TV shows like Soccer Saturday.
Let me repeat: The association and American varieties of football are merely two of several codes that all emerged in the mid-19th century from people in various countries attempting to formalize in some way the informal sport of "running with/kicking the leather-covered thing" that has existed for thousands of years. Not, as the average Briton who thinks the word "soccer" is a product of 1970s American culture vaguely believes, Americans seeing British association football in action and rudely deciding to change the "mother sport" by changing the shape of the ball and letting players carry it.
I guess OP means The football that is played or watched by the majority of people in the world. Other football games have order(s) of magnitude less fans fwiw.
Had this discussion in Japanese the other day. One sport is called soccer サッカー and the other is football in both languages, and then you just have to hear about European languages calling it something similar at companies with an international basis. If you really don't care about either you just call it アメフト so nobody is happy.
It's just under 73 washing machines laid on their backs end-to-end.
That does assume, though, that you got the tallest possible washing machine, which stands at a whopping 47 inches, compared to the industry average of a puny not-even 41 inches.
(It's honestly mind-blowing to me that I could get this data [1] in a few seconds, when it might've been nearly impossible in a sane amount of time ~10 years ago. But I'm also enjoying just citing it really casually.)
This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at.
I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.
I saw it from my car today while driving before I knew it was going to be in my area. It was very visible to the naked eye. It was large enough that the perspective made it seem a lot lower altitude than it actually was.
When I first heard of the balloon I thought it was brilliant. I am always amused at relatively cheap ideas that cost your opponent a lot. I figured this would cost the U.S. a lot. Even the President might waste 20 minutes with 15 highly paid experts being briefed on the balloon. It sounds like I was wrong about that. News reports stated the President was receiving regular ballon briefings.
I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population?
How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down?
If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.
Sure, I didn't mean to be 'unfair' or to make too much of it (it hits the news every time, as though it's at all likely it would've been a genuine threat) - just to offer another example of something I assume is similar in motive.
As a data point: previously spotted surveillance blimps in the Asia Pacific theatre use a clear balloon. Either China wanted to see if it would be detected, or is woefully behind the US equivalents.
I am equally puzzled. But the recent aggressive statement by China [1] makes me think they are testing Biden's resolve. If you fly something in a foreign country's airspace, you don't get to complain that it has been shot down, particularly if it's just hardware. It looks like some sort of provocation to see how confrontational the US gets beyond cheap speech on TV. And I can't help suspecting that what made the US wait so long to shoot it is indecisiveness. It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety.
>It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety.
Ok, but having it drop into water should increase the chance to retrieve less damaged parts to investigate then. I'd call this thoughtful, not indecivise.
Water will behave like concrete to an object of the size and weight of a car dropping at high speed (which seems to be the payload minus the solar panels). You can just see what happened to planes that crashed into water head on.
If it was built as a balloon, none of those panels have any structure to support significant wind loading (balloons above 40k feet feel zero appreciable wind). They would come apart like confetti a few seconds into free fall.
To me it seems like it could also be a very cheeky response to the US declassifying all those UFO sightings and going "well, we really don't know what this is. Could be from China."
Indeed, this kind of thing used to happen half a century ago before the invention of spy satellites and before Gary Powers got shot down over the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident
Even the types of arguments made for this kind of thing are the same.
> Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases.
Claiming "weather research" is basically one of the oldest lies on the books you can make which kind of concretes the fact that it wasn't for weather research.
And until a couple of years ago, we also allowed it.
>The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them.
>[...]
>On 22 November 2020, United States official sources [...] announced that the six-month period was over and the U.S. was no longer a party to the Treaty.
Hmm, do we even need trig? Naively I would imagine that simple proportions would hold — e.g. same visible size @ twice the distance = object is twice as big
It looks like the large size is mostly just solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) and their scaffolding. From some of the available photos there's two wings, each with eight panels.
There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping the thing would stay aloft for a long time?
My guess is that the actual package of equipment - batteries and sensors - is quite small. Maybe a telescope and gyro stabilizer or gimbal was part of the setup. Insulation probably bulked it up quite a bit; it's very, very cold at that altitude.
I'd be curious what sort of uplink they were using, assuming the thing was actually fully functional as a spying device. I'd say there is a decent chance it was largely a dummy, designed to see what our reaction would be.
I don't particularly like the precedent we just set. There's no evidence it was a weapon, its flight path was easily tracked and slow so our military could hardly argue it was a surveillance threat especially compared to satellites, it's well outside commercial aviation flight ranges.
If they want to send balloons over us at 80,000 feet...let them? Who cares? They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery.
We can hardly point fingers. The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.
Sails are useless in a balloon. The only way to steer a balloon without a propeller is to raise and lower its altitude seeking a wind blowing in the right direction.
And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.
No, as Walter said, it's moving with the wind, i.e. it has the same speed as the wind. It's only if there's a sudden gust that you would see anything flowing over the balloon.
I took part in a balloon experiment a couple of years back, essentially a weather balloon with several cameras, including one pointing upwards - we could watch (after we retrieved the cameras later) hours with footage of the balloon itself. There were various loose threads etc, and I assure you - there wasn't much movement! Occasionally there would be a little gust, when that happened the payload would swing around a little bit, but for the most part it was very quiet. Particularly at the highest altitudes.
The problem at 60k feet is actually you are above the weather and don't have a ton of wind to work with. Moving up and down in the minor wind currents is far more efficient energy wise and practically.
The Space Shuttle flew missions with an imaging radar that discovered ancient riverbeds beneath deep sand in the Sahara. At the time, some thought it would have worked equally well to disclose buried military infrastructure.
If that thing had a radar strong enough to see through dirt from 50,000ft, it should have also been causing havoc to all sorts of electrical equipment too.
I know nothing of radar, but could the radar be shaped like routers beam forming? Couldn’t the radar also be switched off over the majority of inconsequential areas?
Okay, genius: explain how easy it is to generate as good imagery at 80,000 feet (almost ten times the typical aerial imagery altitude) from a platform being buffeted and spun and tilted by the wind with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon.
Now compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery in their choice of bands.
> explain how easy it is to generate as good imagery at 80,000 feet
Camera gimbals provide image stability regardless of motion in 3D space. Digital post processing is used to clean up images from planes and other moving sources.
> with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon.
People seem to really underestimate the size of these balloons. They are hundreds of feet across and capable of lifting massive loads. Using Google's Loon as an example it had a balloon that weighed almost 200 pounds and carried an additional 175 pounds of solar panels before you even added the mission payload.
> compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery
Satellites have predictable passes and military installations schedule sensitive outdoor activities around them. The problem for defenders with balloons is that they can loiter on station for months at a time making scheduling around them impractical.
> I don't particularly like the precedent we just set
especially in view of the fact that the upper limit of sovereign airspace is not defined by international law. In fact there are proposals to treat the 18-160km zone as a transitional region of reduced sovereignty akin to EEZs.
> Legally however, it is an indistinct region where it is not clear whether the operations that take place are covered by aviation or space conventions and treaties, in particular with reference to the freedom of overflight that applies to space orbital operations
Also:
> Although outer space is free, if states are allowed to claim vertical sovereignty up to the point where orbital dynamics are possible, other states will be precluded from having free access to space
> John A. Johnson, General Counsel of [NASA] and [of USAF], said in 1964 "there should therefore be no legal basis for protesting, merely on grounds of unpermitted presence, the overflight of national territory by ascending and descending spacecraft, regardless of altitude."
While that’s an admirable goal, in practice this is an operation above or in US airspace, which seemed to be unannounced by another nation state. There is little wiggle room for an honest blunder. China could have send out a press release their balloon was out of control or whatever.
I agree the visibility makes it worse, but my sense is that stratospheric balloon overflight is something that happens fairly frequently and most of the time does not cause diplomatic incidents (which explains why we heard nothing about it the 4-5 times it happened in the past several years). Another instance is this Google balloon that recently fell out of the sky in the Congo: https://twitter.com/kambale/status/1621811081206439937
When an aircraft doesnt have a transponder, doesnt respond to radio calls, no flight plan on file, and seems to be adrift, it is a hazard to navigation irrespective of altitide. Such things get intercepted and, if in any way dangerous, are shot down. Post-9/11, there are even protocols for shooting down unresponsive airliners.
If you believe the Chinese officials, they had lost control of the balloon. Things that go up must famously go down, though that's not their department said Wernher Von Braun.
The only thing I find strange is that they didn't throw in something about hurting the feelings of the Chinese people[0] for good measure. They like to call this Wolf Warrior diplomacy; but it really comes across more as crying wolf diplomacy.
That precedence was set way back in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union started shooting at US U-2 spy planes, and especially in 1960 when they finally succeeded in shooting down the US U-2 spy plane with pilot Gary Powers.
This overflight was termed by the Soviets as an "Act of aggression". This Chinese incident is no less an act of aggression, and merely continues the precedent.
If the Chinese really wanted it considered otherwise because they had actually lost control of the device, they could have easily warned us of the problem and requested coordinated assistance in recovering their device (which would of course allow us to examine it). The PRC govt did no such thing.
And the critics complaining about not shooting it down sooner are ignoring two key things. First, the payload was 2-4 school-busses in length, and dropping such a thing from 12+ miles up in a random location even in sparsely populated areas is a ridiculous hazard. Second, we can be quite confident that the US military could neutralize any data collection or transmission during the transit, and the shoot-down over our waters eliminated the possibility of PRC recovering any stored data.
Well.. November 2003, so only after that can you claim "decades", plural.. it's a while yes, but clearly shows that at least it's in the realm of commercial aircraft, and may happen again, in principle.
Edit: By the way, that comment said, and I quote, "Name one plane that flies at more than 60,000 feet, I'll wait."
No word "commercial" there. So, aside from the Concorde, there were/are several others, some already mentioned.
No Concordes any more I'm afraid. There are no military or civilian planes that fly that high -- unless the CIA dusts off a U-2. There is no navigation risk.
In contrast, every orbital launch has to deal with 10s of thousands of pieces of space debris.
Several military airplanes, including fighters, can and do fly that high and more. I never said anything about navigation risks - that was from other posters. Obviously space debris is a much higher daily risk, for satellites.
The F-15 and Eurofighter Typhoon have published service ceilings of 65000ft, put them in a vertical climb and they will go a lot higher than that, the Streak Eagle reached 103000ft.
Haha yesss! I remember that post from a couple days ago. Really cool. I don't watch anime myself but the Itano missile effect is pretty sweet to behold
> The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.
And if they could, other countries would love to shoot them out of the air and it would be fair. You don't put planes like the U2 in operation without being aware of the risks.
I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by pointing that out.
It could’ve actually been a “science experiment” just launched at the behest of the military as a test like you say. So they’d have plausible deniability like the “fishing boats” in the South China Sea
Why would there need to be any plausible deniability for flying a spy aircraft over another country?
The U-2 spy plane did just that, as did Project Genetrix (Unmanned surveillance balloons), and then later, the SR-71 Blackbird, and as much as the Soviets complained, complaining and shooting at them was pretty much all they could do.
They shot down/recovered so many Project Genetrix balloons, in fact, that their left-over radiation-hardened film was re-used by the Soviet space program in their Luna 3 Moon probe.
All the sound and fury around this seems to be a serious case of 'the shoe is now on our foot'.
>They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery.
Is that true? Just from quickly poking around, LEO satellites seem to orbit at about triple the height, moving far faster than a balloon lazily floating along the jetstream. Probably can use a larger variety of instruments as well.
I'm mildly embarrassed to say I didn't even notice the discrepancy in units. Obviously, 200,000 ft (or 300k, but 200 was the figure I saw first) isn't really plausibly high enough to constitute orbit.
I don't know why you are downvoted but I agree with your point that the shooting down feels a bit like an overreaction.
For instance, the Pentagon has just reported that several Chinese balloons have been crossing US airspace in the recent years [1], also during Trump presidency. These were not shut down, they were not even reported at the time AFAIK.
I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story.
But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion?
I ask simply because a payload the length of 3-4 school busses (apparently 45 feet) would be quite large and the ballon itself much much larger than I was imagining