Of course. But it’s still not thousands. These are low orbit satellites and you can see them at night with no telescope or anything if it’s dark enough where you are.
Having done a fair amount of remote sensing I don’t get what information they are getting from these balloons they don’t get from existing aerial sources.
Surely they are not flying over restricted airspace like the White House unnoticed.
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It’s a number, Micro. OK, not thousands maybe, could be lower than a hundo apparently (if you believe any numbers)
The point remains, 10 satellites can achieve the same mission better than one undirectional balloon so why send the balloon unless you want the balloon to be noticed? Maybe because the chinese want precedent to start shooting down US spy stuff in their airspace.
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The satellites are noticed too. It’s all noticed. The balloons are like 1/4th as far away as the low orbit satellites and probably get better pictures. Possibly gathering info that you can’t get outside the atmosphere.
Or another way of putting that is the chinese haven’t entered that many wars since the 1950’s on ‘good’ intellegence that they’ve than ran from leaving the country in quagmire, as they made some shitty decisions.
If they’ve made one or two claims that a USAian may not be able to rectify internally, then that’s has little impact on the planet other than restraining the US. Like you dudes would refrain from an island as close to your shores as Taiwan - that’s a separate issue but, as we all know, US wouldn’t do much other than bluster if Taiwan was invaded tomorrow.
I don’t think that’s true and Taiwan is hardly defenseless on its own. It would be very difficult for China to successfully invade Taiwan without US support and impossible with it and the US has 3 Air Craft Carrier Groups located relatively close to Taiwan.
I am not sure about this. Unless it’s parameters outside the light spectrum I can’t think what it would be.
I think it’s most likely just better resolution pictures. I saw someone else suggest some kind of chemical detection and it seems plausible, but shrug.
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That tiktok is having a contest to see who can make the best videos in the White House is finally making sense to me.
What I have heard about balloons is if they are at the right altitude they can stay over a specific area for a long period of time feeding non stop data that you can’t do with satellites.
At least that is something I heard/read around the time of the first balloon.
same dog does all the bumps (except for the last one). selfish sonofabitch
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Yes, and the US routinely uses them to monitor China. This was my balloon theory in the other thread.
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Nah they haven’t announced it yet.
NORAD
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Kind of reminds me…am I the only one here who played this game?
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“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] spying programme,” the White House National Security Council told reporters, “or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts”.
A “leading explanation” being considered by US intelligence, he added, was that “these could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign”.
Beijing earlier accused the US of “a trigger-happy overreaction”.
Meanwhile, Romania scrambled fighter jets on Tuesday to investigate an aerial object entering European airspace.
But the country’s defence ministry said the pilots were unable to locate it and abandoned the mission after half an hour.