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Comment by kqr2 | Hacker News Reader

Although it might not be related to the Chinese balloon, does the US have the technology to capture it intact vs shooting it down? It seems like they are going through a lot of trouble now to recover the pieces after it was shot down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_retrieval

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I'd imagine that there's enough of a possibility of an ability to self-destruct that it may not be worth the risk.

I feel if the balloon was carrying an explosive payload this would definitely be an act of war. Would it be worth it for the Chinese to do that?

The payload doesn’t have to be explosive to be self destructive. Spy gear and weather gear can be the same hardware, I assume the ROM on the hardware and the data collected would be the real evidence. Some well-placed magnesium strips or maybe even deleting the data as a failsafe would be effective. Wouldn’t surprise me if shooting it down was the least risky idea. It’ll probably be 40 years until we know what the real reasoning is though!

It would absolutely be bad, and there would—I hope—be consequences, but if they clearly didn't intend to bomb anything, it would probably not be considered any more of an act of war than if their balloon fell out of the sky and hurt someone.

Could you tell a lithium battery apart from an intentional self-destruct?

Not really, except for the U2 spy plan the US has no (known) aircraft that can fly anything close to that high

F22 service ceiling (declassified) is 65k feet. It’s almost certainly much higher.

Both the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 can fly higher than the Alaska object's altitude.

the first big balloon was described as 'as large as three buses' .. I'm not sure you are going to do any midair retrieval on something like that.

Actually the Chinese balloon payload is thought to be only about 900kg or about 2000lbs:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2358955-chinese-spy-bal...

A US Military Cargo Helicopter can lift up to 36,000lbs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_CH-53K_King_Stallion

It has a 16,000 ft ceiling though. The balloon was at 60,000 ft.

Helos can't get up that far, and 900kg is about the size of a small car. That's pretty heavy for some "weather sensors".

Really i think the only way they could have done to gather any intelligence on the thing would have been to get a man on it somehow. Every way I figure it would have been a crazy nightmare of failures though.

Also no telling if the thing wasn't stuffed with explosives, if it was for intelligence gathering I'd imagine that it would have some kind of self destruct system for at least the portions that handle uplink.

Well one way to do it would be to shoot holes in the balloon so it leaks and descends slowly. Of course can’t wait for it to be over the sea to do that.

I wonder if a heavily weighted net (or rope/lasso) would work.

The difficulty is attaching a net. Would need a blimp or something to do it, since fighter airplanes aren't exactly suited for this kind of work.

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