Nobody needs to send balloons, which lets face it could go almost anywhere, when they have satellites. I can only think it's about testing radar and early warning systems.
I was watching DW news last night. They explained that balloons have a couple of advantages over satellites. They fly much lower, so can get higher resolution images, and they can loiter, whereas a satellite just whizzes past several times a day. The latter is perhaps the most important point, as everyone knows where the satellites are and therefore when they'll have the best view, so anyone trying to conceal something just has to plan their schedule wisely to avoid giving away too much when a satellite is directly overhead. Apart from spying, it could also just be the age old strategy of testing a nation's readiness. This has been going on certainly as long as I've ever known, probably longer. It's not even a secret. In any case, I still think it's a massive fuss over nothing, and the diplomatic fallout feels a bit childish to me. It feels like that scenario we've surely all witnessed in a pub when two lads decide to have a battle, except they don't, because both make enough fuss before hand to allow time for their mates to hold them back, so they can shout threats and abuse at eachother from ten foot apart while sticking their chests out and making precisely zero effort to break free of the grip of their mates. Then after a minute they'll accept their friend's pleas that it's not worth it, calm down, and then spend the rest of the evening discussing with their respective mates how the other was clearly the first to back down.
If the US had thought the first Chinese balloon was a threat it would have been destroyed at first contact. Not allowed to traverse the continent then shot down once it reached the Eastern seaboard. The new hoo-ha is about UK police using Chinese drones. Every time they fly them they could be relaying the images directly back to China. Via a balloon, we must imagine. One outcome of recovering the electronics from the sensor pack is they will be able to find who if any US company is selling stuff to China. During the first Gulf War, our parent company was asked to identify fancy laser coatings recovered from Iraq. They informed us that we had supplied them. They had been legally sold to India and onward from there to Iraq.
With all this moden tec you would have thought they know where they came from with all there tracking/radar etc etc
It's a constant game of cat and mouse. One bunch of scientists and engineers work on better ways to detect things, while another bunch work on better ways to evade detection. Look at the F35 for example. It apparently has state of the art sensors to detect things better than ever before, while at the same time being carefully designed to be as close as it (currently) gets to being undetectable itself.
I wonder what the border would look like if that hadn't happened. Thinking about it would be Canada's problem.
1867 $0.39 per acre. Also Louisiana purchase 1803 from the French $15 million for 530 million acres of central USA from Louisiana along the Mississippi to the Canadian border; note the Native Americans who already lived there were not consulted or paid. People can make their own minds up about which was the better deal, one brought oodles of oil. The other New Orleans jazz, blues plus a lot of land for cattle and farming.
In my biker days, I was riding home from work just after 10 pm one dark night. Between Aberdour and Burntisland I saw this very bright light, stationary, in the sky. As I continued on it just hung there. I had visions of getting sooked up and "probed". No such luck. Suddenly it turned and headed in, to land at Edinburgh airport. Our relative speeds and directions had made it appear stationary to me. It was just an aircraft landing light.
