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Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

Using guns wouldn’t work well because of various interesting aspects of physics. It was tried before on a different balloon and based on that they used a missile. In this situation it was important that the balloon be disabled in one hit and crashed within US territorial waters to avoid bigger headaches. The US regularly patrols just outside a Chinese airspace and for the US to shoot at something outside it’s airspace or have the ballon crash in international waters would open up a whole different can of worms.

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Perhaps worth noting that the US did overflights of China with drones (or at least attempted to) as recently as 1971:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_D-21

Why is something "as recently" as 1971 worth noting?

Of course it doesn't justify what China did (I wasn't making a "two wrongs make a right" argument) - but it might help explain the thought processes of the Chinese leadership in pulling a stunt like this - I would suspect that they are aware of US overflights over China.

Talk to a diplomat about "precedents". And to someone familiar with current politics in China about the policy of cultivating memories of past indignities, which were suffered at the hands of foreign powers.

Indignities as recent as 1945.

I’m thinking that quite a few indignities were far more recent. Perhaps you are using the word as a euphemism for thing far worse?

Make it eastern Europe, and you can go all the way back to 1003.

If you're opening the can of European/Near Eastern History, the clear record of foreign power atrocities (vs. mere indignities) goes back quite a few millennia further than that.

As recent as 1842

That was before even Nixon's famous visit when we still had zero diplomatic relations with China, and those drones were completely replaced by satellites, which both the US and China use on each other to this day. Your 50 year old example has zero relevance to today.

Not just China, and not just drones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident

However, this incident is going to establish an interesting precedent of when it is ok to shoot down an satellite.

The difference between a baloon and a satellite is pretty massive, and airspace != space. Granted, there is no clear border between those two (the Kármán line is somewhat artificial), but there is a clear difference between orbiting stuff and stuff that needs air in order to fly, and long term behavior of powers that be clearly distinguishes between those two.

I suspect historically it had more to do with capabilities than anything else. If you had the power to shoot it down, you would, and nobody could shoot down a satellite. Of course now, everybody and their brother has satellites and shooting them down would be major bad for everybody involved.

Yes. In practice, your airspace is what you can defend.

This kind of thing has a long history -- the old "three mile limit" for territorial waters had more to do with the maximum range of cannon than it did anything else.

How is this fundamentally different from the U-2 incident? The precedent is already set: a nation has sovereign rights over its airspace

Interestingly enough there doesn't seem to be an agree vertical extent as to where "airspace" stops:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace

I don't see how this would set a precedent - it was over the US and they shot it down, seems pretty clear cut to me.

> Interestingly enough there doesn't seem to be an agree vertical extent as to where "airspace" stops...

I suspect you'll get pretty universal agreement that 60-80k feet isn't that limit, though.

> Interestingly enough there doesn't seem to be an agree vertical extent as to where "airspace" stops

But there is a somewhat shared definition of where space start in the Kármán line at 100km of altitude so it should follow that the vertical airspace stops where space sparts? I might be completely wrong though.

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