It's telling that the government has been saying the balloon is to take pictures of your backyard (which China already has), becuase the only real reason China would send a balloon is to either test US early warning radar (which to be fair sucks shit in every country) or to get the US to acutally shoot it down to see what the capabilities of US ultra-high altitude interceptors are. The balloon is so high up that planes can't safely shoot it down. It would be interesting to see if either the Patriot system or the SM-6 could actually hit something outside of a testing scenario, and presumably you could take readings of the missile during ascent.
Although hitting a stationary balloon is pretty easy, even for the US's terrible interceptors that constantly fail. So I don't know what anyone could learn from that. I'm pretty sure it's a weather balloon that snapped it's mooring.
I do think it’s interesting the pentagon has said they aren’t shooting it down out of fear for damaging people on the ground. There’s a 0% chance they give a shit about that, and it’s flying over a lot of low population density areas anyway. My guess is they can’t shoot it down.
my guess is that they don't want to shoot it down (even if they could which they couldn't) because they'd rather every goober in Kansas go out to their backyard with a pair of binoculars to look for it. The balloon is on tour generating hype for the tiktok ban.
It's telling that the government has been saying the balloon is to take pictures of your backyard (which China already has), becuase the only real reason China would send a balloon is to either test US early warning radar (which to be fair sucks shit in every country) or to get the US to acutally shoot it down to see what the capabilities of US ultra-high altitude interceptors are. The balloon is so high up that planes can't safely shoot it down. It would be interesting to see if either the Patriot system or the SM-6 could actually hit something outside of a testing scenario, and presumably you could take readings of the missile during ascent.
Although hitting a stationary balloon is pretty easy, even for the US's terrible interceptors that constantly fail. So I don't know what anyone could learn from that. I'm pretty sure it's a weather balloon that snapped it's mooring.
I do think it’s interesting the pentagon has said they aren’t shooting it down out of fear for damaging people on the ground. There’s a 0% chance they give a shit about that, and it’s flying over a lot of low population density areas anyway. My guess is they can’t shoot it down.
my guess is that they don't want to shoot it down (even if they could which they couldn't) because they'd rather every goober in Kansas go out to their backyard with a pair of binoculars to look for it. The balloon is on tour generating hype for the tiktok ban.
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