Saturday, February 4, 2023

Chyna Balloon

 On the China balloon thing; this event strikes me as being a "proof of concept" demonstration of lighter-than-air lifting body control technology development. Granted a classical balloon isn't at all "cutting edge" lifting body design, but the control software and hardware to tack and jibe to deliberately maneuver the balloon into and across the prevailing wind is (tacking and jibing a vessel is well understood conceptually; doing so autonomously is less so). This strikes me as being the most easily achievable means of extending the overhead observation time window over a given geographic region.

As to not shooting it down over land, while it's always possible the Chinese chose to just bleed off hydrogen from the balloon to power an on-board generator, the Chinese space program has almost certainly acquired/developed "nuclear battery" technology (which is technically neither; radioactive material creating heat as a by-product of its decay rate and converting that heat directly into electricity isn't nearly as easy to say though and is technology that is at least as old as Voyager 1) and would likely regard this as a good test platform for their latest development efforts in that technology. Having some hunter/hiker find one of those cracked open on the ground somewhere is not an eventuality to casually take a risk over with the open ocean off America's coastline being such a ready-to-hand option instead. It should be noted that the USN has extensive undersea recovery technology immediately at hand along the US eastern seaboard. As long as the device came down on the US continental shelf (and since the shoot down was filmable from land this seems virtually certain), recovering objects from less than 100 fathoms depth isn't all that technologically challenging for a well-enough heeled private citizen these days (Hello James Cameron!). Remember that Challenger went down well beyond the depths to be expected from this shoot down and that wreckage was closely examined in situ as well as partially recovered back onto land.

The more interesting question to me is, how did the Chinese receive whatever data was collected by the device? What did the (alleged!) surveillance device record, and to what did it transmit that data (in what spectrum?)? All of this can be ascertained from any wreckage that is recovered from the sea bed, if only by analysis of the components used in its manufacture.

An interesting event. Mostly not even remotely well reported on. Hopefully that part of things will be improved upon sooner than later.

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