This post touches on a number of points. The first is that we shouldn’t be complacent about balloons over the United States. It seems to me that would be a relatively inexpensive means. The second is that the drawing above was produced based on my description by DALL-E 2, another artificial intelligence program written by OpenAI.
The third is that the description was based by me by shamelessly cribbing on the cover art of a copy of the pulp magazine Air Stories from a century ago. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
I’m not worried about the balloon – it’s an old game – they collect on us and we collect on them. I’m somewhat confident there are plans in place to collect the ballon somewhere over the Atlantic. But if the Chinese are smart, they would have thought of that and will cut the payload once over the ocean.
Anyway, now that this is public, I think the government will not let it happen again. Allowing two foreign balloons to enter US airspace is embarrassing.
It is a stray weather ballon. The fact that the US military is freaked out about it is yet another indication of their utter incompetence and stupidity. At what point in an officer’s career is his brain removed? We really, really need a purge of the officer class. Perhaps we need to close the military academies.
Weather balloons are really quite common (another strike against the military). They can maneuver vertically by jettisoning ballast or gas, but they have no horizontal maneuverability whatsoever; they are playthings of the wind. They are useless for ground surveillance. They might possibly pick up some radio chatter, but in advance you have no idea whether you will get WKRP or NORAD.
This is one of the most embarrassing events in recent history, the whole US government panicked by a weather balloon.