Earlier this month, a suspected Chinese reconnaissance balloon drifted over much of the continental United States before being shot down by an F-22 military fighter jet off the East Coast. The event has put a heavy strain on already fragile US-China relations, with China claiming the erroneous balloon was simply collecting weather data. said it was.
The incident put stratospheric balloon technology in an unexpected spotlight. High-altitude balloons themselves are nothing new. In fact, there are thousands of balloons operating in the stratosphere every day, Rema Matevosyan, CEO of Near Space Labs, explained in his TechCrunch interview. But it’s not every day that you get shot out of the sky like Top Gun.
Near Space Labs is an American company founded in 2017 that operates commercial high-altitude balloons. Near Space balloons, like thousands of other weather and earth observation balloons currently drifting in the stratosphere, carry a variety of payloads depending on the purpose of the mission. The ability to swap payloads makes the balloon a very flexible platform for Earth observation, Matebosian said.
She was hesitant to speculate on what information the Chinese balloon might have captured — “Let’s wait for the data to be declassified by the sensors,” she suggested — but She said that Chinese balloons and their payloads are thousands of weather balloons equipped with atmospheric sensors. A US official said the size of the payload onboard the Chinese balloon was about the size of three school buses, which may suggest there are multiple types of sensors, she said. said.
Shooting down objects at such high altitudes also presents challenges. The stratosphere is much thinner than the lower layers of the atmosphere, and if you get close enough you can pin a balloon, but given the altitude limits for commercial aircraft, it’s impossible to get that close. A military jet isn’t just designed to carry missiles, but its unique geometry is optimized to maximize aerodynamic efficiency, speed and lift-to-mass ratio, Matevosian explains. Did. According to the Pentagon, the F-22 launched the Sidewinder missile at an altitude of 58,000 feet. The balloon was flying at about 60,000 to 65,000 feet, so the missile didn’t have to travel very far in the stratosphere.
“The air is so thin,” Matebosian said. “The stratosphere is closer to the Martian atmosphere than the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s actually very complicated to navigate. […] You really need a plane because you need a very stable platform to fly a missile. “
The big question neither TechCrunch nor Matevosyan can answer is why shoot down this balloon. why now? “Cases of this type of ballooning activity have been observed before over the past several years,” the Pentagon said. Given that, many wonder why Washington decided now was the time to draw the line. It remains to be seen if this operation will definitely escalate relations between the two countries, or if it will just end up being another move in a game of superpower chess.
