America received a surprise this week when the Pentagon revealed the presence of a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon over the continental United States.
According to Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder:
"The United States Government has detected and is tracking a high altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now. The U.S. government, to include NORAD, continues to track and monitor it closely. The balloon is currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground. Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years. Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information."
In a followup telephone background briefing for the media, an unnamed "senior defense official" stated the following:
"Secretary Austin convened senior DoD leadership yesterday, even as he was on the road in the Philippines. It was the strong recommendation by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, and the commander of NORTHCOM, General VanHerck, not to take kinetic action due to the risk to safety and security of people on the ground from the possible debris field."
"Currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective. But we are taking steps, nevertheless, to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information."
According to China's Foreign Ministry:
“It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his upcoming trip to China in response to the incident.
On Friday afternoon, the Pentagon issued a statement saying that as of noon, the Chinese balloon, which was over Montana one day prior, was at an altitude of about 60,000 feet and floating over the center of the continental United States in an easterly direction, posing no risk to commercial aviation, military assets or people on the ground.
On Saturday afternoon, the balloon was successfully shot down off the South Carolina coast.
Background
While the Pentagon is understandably being cautious with the information being released to the public about this matter, a considerable amount of open-source data is available to help fill in some background.
For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense operates it's own high altitude balloon program known as COLD STAR, which is an acronym for Covert Long-Dwell Stratospheric Architecture. Within the program, high-altitude inflatables, flying at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet, would be added to the Pentagon’s extensive ground-based, airborne and space-based surveillance network and could eventually be used to track... hypersonic weapons. Remember... If you want to track a fast moving object coming from over the horizon, you have to get up high, and the stratospheric balloons provide a unique platform to deploy a range of different sensor and communications packages.
In terms of the size of these balloons, readers will recall that as you ascend in altitude, gas expands to a greater volume due to decreased pressure. Thus, the balloons used to loft large sensor packages into the stratosphere can be quite large. What would start on the ground looking like a long, upsidedown teardrop can, at altitude, expand to sizes 400 feet in diameter and larger.
Learn more about the balloon shown in the image at the top.
Learn more about NASA's Stratospheric Balloon Program (PDF). Note the massive sizes of the payload gondolas.
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What we know about the high-altitude balloons off America’s coastlines
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On Friday evening, AlertsUSA subscribers were notified of reports of fighter jets, an explosion and smoke trail in the sky near Billings, MT in vicinity where the Chinese surveillance balloon was observed earlier in the week. Later Friday evening, Billings Police Chief Rich St. John commented on the Montana Talks radio network that "We have no reports of anything falling from the sky. Fire, PD, or Comm Center. Our PIO has reported same to council."
That's interesting. The flight tracking website ADSB Exchange showed two Blackhawk helicopters in the air around Billings shortly after the incident was first reported. There are at least two videos circulating on social media purporting to show the smoke trail from different angles. And finally, STARLINK's-5319 satellite was within a reentry window with a final track over Montana at the time of the reported incident.
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