De-amplifying the risk and pointing out that 3 were seen under the prior administration and nothing was done along side the ubiquity of LEO sats with high quality RF and optics.

Starlink's next generation of LEO orbitals will pick up Mobile phone device signals to provide service: So what exactly is the benefit of a balloon?

It says nothing about Chinese intelligence, and maybe quite a lot about the lack of coordination in remote earth sensing between nation states using the jetstream this happened this way. They should be chastised for not reporting it, assuming somebody at NOAA or the American Academy of Sciences didn't in fact get a heads-up.

Shooting it was performative reactive management and did nothing particularly useful in the geo politics space. Like everything, it was targetted domestically inside the USA

Yeah somehow. Why couldn't they just keep still without saying anything, get that thing down without destroying it too much. Make analysation and whatever they want to do, hack the elektronics.. And then just give it back like ohh ye, by the way here.. fell from the sky. Nearly killed one. If you do this next time, may be we can collaborate? Lol