Balloon games

[les green01]

Originally Posted by Armistead

I got my trusty 50 cal black powdered rifle ready and thought maybe 500 grains would do the trick.

just to think i use to have alot of fun poping them with a pellet rifle but i can throw in a flintlock and walker

[Jimbuna]

[Rockstar]

I was listening to some journalists actually ask some really good questions of the Pentagon representative. Such as have these objects been identified before missiles are fired at them? And the pentagon’s official’s response? Ummm, well, no.

[August]

[Aktungbby]

Bearing in mind that an AIM-9 Sidewinder costs approx: $604,000 + tax and licen$e https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/loca...bject/3075421/

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a group of hobbyists launching and tracking pico balloons, said its "Pico Balloon K9YO" last reported in the early morning hours of Feb. 11, or the afternoon hours of Feb. 10 in local time, near Hagemeister Island, a remote and uninhabited island off the southwest coast in Alaska.
Pico ballooning, according to the brigade, is part of "Amateur Radio" also known as "ham radio" or just "hams."
"We’re licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowing us to communicate to other Hams throughout the world," their website states. "Pico meaning small, we send a small transmitter, with GPS tracking and antenna on a balloon filled with Hydrogen, rising to 47,000 feet, and travelling with the speed of the Jetstream. As we travel, our GPS is able to locate our current location, and other information is gathered depending on what chips we have on our transmitter while using other programs to gather other inflight information."

And the one shot down over Lake Huron took two missiles...and one was shot down over Canada; total: 5 AIM-9 missiles in all =$3,020,000, not incl. tax and licen$e thus far https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/polit...oon/index.html

Canadian retired Maj. Gen. Scott Clancy, former director of operations at NORAD and former deputy commander of the Alaskan NORAD Region, said on Monday he does not believe China is behind the unidentified objects that have been shot down in recent days. He explained that it could be a “confluence of a distinctive activity by our adversaries to test the systems.”
“It smells to me, as the guy who was directed to conduct operations to defend North America, I’d be very suspicious,” Clancy said on “CNN This Morning.” “And I’d be on high alert to make sure that all of our adversaries are being countered.”
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, Melissa Dalton told reporters on Sunday they were taken down out of an “abundance of caution.”
Dalton said that high-altitude objects can be used by a range of companies, countries, and research organizations for “purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research.”

BOTTOM LINE: the current balloon mania has matriculated into an OK Corral kneejerk response frenzy....

[Catfish]

Wouldn't an MG round have been enough for a balloon.

[Jimbuna]

[Aktungbby]

Editorial in today's WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/did-my-...-hapi-e9eeccef

China accused the U.S. on Monday of having sent more than 10 large balloons into its airspace over the past few years. I might have been the first to do so—but it was long ago, and if I’m guilty, it was inadvertent.

Like China’s balloon that sailed over the U.S. this year, mine was about 200 feet tall and flew at 65,000 feet. Mine was launched in 1967 and bore the name “HAPPE” on the container holding the craft’s data-collection instruments, known as its science package. Is it a coincidence that, according to the Journal, China named its balloon program, begun in the late 1960s or ’70s, the HAPI project?Our name was an acronym for High Altitude Particle Physics Experiment. The program, developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was the brainchild of Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, an American physicist. I joined the project as a graduate student. Happe’s goal was to conduct experiments using high-altitude cosmic rays, specifically with high-energy protons that don’t penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere.

To get the enormous Happe package above 95% of the proton-stopping atmosphere would require a large (300 feet tall) helium-filled balloon. Such balloons are essentially impossible to steer. They travel in whatever direction the high winds carry them. These winds are seasonal, and when we launched a prototype, Happe-0, from Palestine, Texas, we did so during one of the two brief periods every year called turnaround. That’s when the wind reverses direction and is temporarily low velocity, making a balloon less likely to be blown into an urban area. To track the balloon’s location, we used a World War II system called long-range navigation, or Loran, aboard the package. Loran was decommissioned in 2010 after GPS became available. Much of rural Texas was approved for safe landing by state and national regulators. But if our balloon was about to wander out of the safe region, we sent a radio signal that fired two on-board explosive knives known as squibs. One squib would release the science package and the other would rip the balloon. The package would descend to Earth on a parachute while the severed balloon slowly fluttered down like an enormous autumn leaf. In 1947, a similar balloon from a classified experiment called Project Mogul crashed near Roswell, N.M., and ignited the flying-saucer frenzy.

The future Happe-1 project involved complex technologies and would yield no data for my doctorate for almost a decade. I was impatient so I invented a smaller experiment I called Happe-½. We launched Happe-½, with a balloon only 200 feet tall, from the Chico, Calif., airport in 1967. Rather than wait for a turnaround, we let the stratospheric winds carry the package west above the coastal mountains and safely (we thought) out over the Pacific.

We planned to let the balloon’s package gather data until it was too far away to send back signals. Then we would fire the squibs and bring the package and balloon down to the ocean. We would use a plane to spot the floating package and a boat to recover it—as well as the balloon, if we could find it.

To pick up instrument signals as the balloon passed overhead, I set up a telemetry station on Cahto Peak, in the California coastal mountains. The package took only a few hours to pass over my telemetry site, and since it did so at night, although I received its nocturnal beeps, I never spotted it visually. Local residents didn’t believe that my telemetry station was part of a cosmic-ray project. They knew NASA had sponsored the experiment and suspected we were studying flying saucers.

When the balloon was over the ocean and out of range of my station, the boat crew sent signals to fire the squibs. What happened next, we don’t know. We never found the balloon, parachute or science package. We guessed that the parachute failed to open and that my apparatus slammed into the ocean at more than 100 miles an hour. My Ph.D. went poof. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the squibs could have failed altogether and that the balloon might have continued westward to the Far East.

I switched to a less-risky project and earned my doctorate in 1969. Did my balloon make it to China? Anything that large could smother humans or animals when it eventually comes down. If the Chinese had tried to shoot it down, they would have discovered that in the 1960s doing so wasn’t easy. A balloon is a big target but the helium pressure inside is very low, so shooting a hole in the side doesn’t quickly bring it down. Would China have protested to the U.S.? The Soviet Union didn’t protest the U-2s over their country, flying at a similar 65,000-foot altitude, until they shot down Francis Gary Powers in 1960.

Stratospheric balloons ultimately succumb to the stress of withstanding heat during the day turning to cold at night, so the Happe-½ apparatus could have descended and been recovered in China with no shooting. Chinese scientists might then have discovered that it was an innocuous science project. They also would have learned that flying across the Pacific was possible, something even I didn’t know at the time. To fly a balloon east, one needed only to wait for the high-altitude wind turnaround, or possibly use a different latitude.

Perhaps the Happe program also alerted China to the espionage potential of stratospheric balloons. (In World War II Japan flew lower-altitude balloons carrying incendiary devices timed to fall over the U.S.)my post #8 above Or maybe Happe initially intrigued China with its science potential. By the 1980s, Chinese scientists were launching their own stratospheric balloons over the Pacific. They named their projects HAPI—written in Mandarin, of course, not English. Was it called that for the joy it brought, as some have suggested? I now think it might have been an homage to Happe. Mr. Muller served as a Jason National Security adviser for 34 years. He is a professor of physics emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include “Physics for Future Presidents” and “Energy for Future Presidents.”

Like I said, we do it to them and they do it to us ??! Throw in the 3 ROC U-2 spy planes shot down in the sixties over Maoist China, undoubtedly on CIA orders -just used in Catfish's who/what/where puzzle-and we are bad guys in our own right with a very myopic sense of precedent... Frankly I'm at 49%-51% consensus toward China's point of view. We should simply shoot down whatever we wish in or own airspace and do it quietly to avoid uneccesary friction in the current buildup to WW III.

[Commander Wallace]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

That's too funny. Hysterical.

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

Editorial in today's WSJ: Like I said, we do it to them and they do it to us ??! Throw in the 3 ROC U-2 spy planes shot down in the sixties over Maoist China, undoubtedly on CIA orders -just used in Catfish's who/what/where puzzle-and we are bad guys in our own right with a very myopic sense of precedent... Frankly I'm at 49%-51% consensus toward China's point of view. We should simply shoot down whatever we wish in or own airspace and do it quietly to avoid uneccesary friction in the current buildup to WW III.

I have serious doubts that the U.S had balloons in China. I would think the U.S has more sophisticated methods for surveillance than balloons. I do agree with just shooting them down. I think the bigger question is, where did these balloons come from ? Were they launched by submarines ?

[Aktungbby]

I have serious doubts that the U.S had balloons in China. I would think the U.S has more sophisticated methods for surveillance than balloons. I do agree with just shooting them down. I think the bigger question is, where did these balloons come from ? Were they launched by submarines ?

It does have sophisticated methods: Our USINT tech has spotted them, incl. this one, launching from Hainan. Given the powerful "atmospheric river" winds lately contributing to heavy weather, the Chinese at least have 'plausible deniability' for their alleged 'force majeure'. As in my post above, we launched approx 510 General Mills balloons over Communist nations in 1956. When challenged, John Foster Dulles "lied thru his teeth" that the balloons were not 'necessarily military related' just as the Chinese are doing 70 odd years later!!? As before, we should simply shoot them down quietly w/o all the press related fanfare. Their sattelites already get the job done as do ours. The value added of helium-Intel gathering is minimal at best. EDIT: This just in; another large white balloon has been spotted 525 miles NE of Hawaii at 40,000 feet. Aircraft have been dispatch to monitor.

[Commander Wallace]

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

It does have sophisticated methods: Our USINT tech has spotted them, incl. this one, launching from Hainan. Given the powerful "atmospheric river" winds lately contributing to heavy weather, the Chinese at least have 'plausible deniability' for their alleged 'force majeure'. As in my post above, we launched approx 510 General Mills balloons over Communist nations in 1956. When challenged, John Foster Dulles "lied thru his teeth" that the balloons were not 'necessarily military related' just as the Chinese are doing 70 odd years later!!? As before, we should simply shoot them down quietly w/o all the press related fanfare. Their sattelites already get the job done as do ours. The value added of helium-Intel gathering is minimal at best.

I was completely unaware of our using balloons in this fashion. I agree the balloons should be shot down, should we encounter anymore. That's after gleening any intelligence we can from them.

[Rockstar]

While flying over the Daytona 500 in Florida.

[Catfish]

^ you're robbing my ideas

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Wouldn't an MG round have been enough for a balloon.

Only if you would be able to puncture the top of the envelope. These are low pressure envelopes so it would not pop like an elastic balloon.


The bad news is that with such a leak, it would be very difficult to predict where it will land/crash.


You can imagine the number of lawyers in the US just waiting for such a thing.

[August]

A Dirigible should be able to reach that altitude. All it would need is a magnifying glass strapped to it. Pop goes the weasel.