Plan B Forum

I don't understand why they don't shoot it down. If it really is a stray weather balloon they will find out easily enough; the chances of damaging anything on the ground is minimal.

BoSoxGal wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:03 am

I thought that was one of Putin's balloons.

-"BB"-

All you people just making fun of this serious situation should be worried. I recently spoke to my cousin, who is real close to Donald Trump, and he said the balloon is filled with illegal Chinese aliens who are parachuting from the balloon at night to various locations and going into cities and selling Fentanyl. And of course now a second balloon has been discovered over Latin America doing the same thing.

It's just another part of China's long term underhanded drug warfare against the western world.

ex-khobar Andy wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 04, 2023 4:40 am

I don't understand why they don't shoot it down. If it really is a stray weather balloon they will find out easily enough; the chances of damaging anything on the ground is minimal.

It’s actually very large, the size of several city buses.

That said Montana is huge and largely uninhabited by anything other than ungulates and sagebrush.

Let's do some arithmetic and some basic physics.

This thing is supposedly at 60,000 feet and is the size of "two school buses" per the military, according to Fox News. (Yes I know, I know.). This is very close to the Armstrong limit above which water boils at temperature of the human body - so for a pilot in a plane at that height, if his craft lost pressurizations, his blood would boil. Not a good thing. Air pressure at this height is 0.061 atmospheres so call it 1/16th atmospheres.

A typical school bus is about 35 feet long by 8 feet wide by 9 feet high. (Thank you Mr Google.). So 2520 cubic feet. Let's go metric so that is 72 cubic meters each. Air temperature at 60,000 feet is -69.7 °F. Let's have that in Kelvins so -69.7 °F = 216 K. So at atmospheric pressure and say 10 °C (a not bad winter day in China = 283 K) and the universal gas laws [ P(n) V(n) / T(n) is constant] the volume of this balloon is

[ ((1/16) x 72) / 216 ] x [ 283 / 1 ] x 2 = 11.8 cubic meters. Call it 12 cubic meters.

Let's assume this is helium (He). It's the only gas that makes sense for a weather balloon. I don't know how many weather balloons I have put up but it's several hundred. Helium has an atomic weight of 4. Air is about 80% nitrogen (AW N2 is 28) and 20% oxygen (AW O2 is 32) and let's ignore the 1% argon. So the effective atomic weight of air is about 29. Thus the lifting power of helium is that of a gas, atomic weight 29 - 4 = 25. At 10 °C one mole of this = 25 g would have a volume of about 23 L. Lifting power of helium is thus very close to 1 gram per liter at realistic earth surface conditions of temperature and pressure.

So a 12 m^3 balloon can lift 12 kilos. That of course includes the weight of the balloon itself so the payload is significantly less. Our weather balloon was close to 1 m^3 and payload was about 200 g. (Temperature and pressure sensors plus radio transmitter.). Payload has to be much less than lift because the balloon itself is not weightless and you want the thing to go up, not hang around at neutral buoyancy. So multiplying up you get a payload of around 2.4 kg or around 6 pounds.

You'd have to have very bad luck in Montana if a 6 pound weight, hanging from a punctured latex balloon, falling from 60,000 feet, hurt anyone. And bear in mind that the payload probably has around the density of styrofoam. I doubt it would make a dent in the grass if it landed on someone's lawn.

"Why not shoot it down? We have to do the risk-reward here," a senior defense official said on Thursday. "So the first question is, does it pose a threat, a physical kinetic threat, to individuals in the United States in the US homeland? Our assessment is it does not. Does it pose a threat to civilian aviation? Our assessment is it does not. Does it pose a significantly enhanced threat on the intelligence side? Our best assessment right now is that it does not. So given that profile, we assess the risk of downing it, even if the probability is low in a sparsely populated area of the debris falling and hurting someone or damaging property, that it wasn't worth it."

A US official added on Friday to CNN: "This isn't like 'Top Gun' where it just explodes and doesn't go anywhere. It's large and it's metal, it would put hundreds of Americans at risk."

Andy you should get on the horn with our stupid military advisors and edumacate them on the science and the total lack of risk to human lives of this balloon and associated surveillance equipment. Let’s blow that fucker out of the sky!

BoSoxGal wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:01 pm

"Let’s blow that fucker out of the sky!"

Where have I heard that quote before?
Oh yeah ... wasn't it on the tapes during the Sakhalin incident when the Russians shot down KAL 007 after it overflew 'sensitive' Soviet territory in 1983?
Yeah, let's provoke an international incident.

-"BB"-

A few thoughts based on too much ignorance. Who cares how big the balloon is. We should be after the instrumentation that it is carrying.

It is a balloon. It is pushed around by the wind. Its air speed is essentially ZERO. Very difficult for planes to fly at that altitude anywhere near that speed.

How 'bout shooting it from a plane with a very small bullet. Give the balloon a slow leak. It drops down more slowly than just falling so maybe we could grab the instrument package or it would hit the ground with minor damage and provide some useful information for us.

And if we do somehow down the thing and obtain the instrumentation, and it turns out that it IS in fact just your ordinary, plain-ol' run-of-the-mill weather balloon containing little more than upper-level atmospheric data as to wind speed and jet-stream patterns, we're going to have some very expensive and embarrassing egg on our collective faces.

Not to mention that we've had just made targets of any weather balloons we (or any other country) might launch should they stray over "foreign" territory.  Granted, countries like China, Russia, and the USA are huge and most balloons launched there will come down within the country of origin — but still, US balloons could easily overfly Mexico or Canada; and there are scads of European, Central American, and African nations that aren't even the same size in terms of area as the state of Texas.  A balloon launched in any of those countries — say, for example, France — could easily overfly a half-dozen other countries within the space of hours.

-"BB"-

Bicycle Bill wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:51 pm

BoSoxGal wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:01 pm

"Let’s blow that fucker out of the sky!"

Where have I heard that quote before?
Oh yeah ... wasn't it on the tapes during the Sakhalin incident when the Russians shot down KAL 007 after it overflew 'sensitive' Soviet territory in 1983?
Yeah, let's provoke an international incident.

-"BB"-

You're not this stupid. It's not possible.

Bicycle Bill wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 04, 2023 6:41 pm

And if we do somehow down the thing and obtain the instrumentation, and it turns out that it IS in fact just your ordinary, plain-ol' run-of-the-mill weather balloon containing little more than upper-level atmospheric data as to wind speed and jet-stream patterns, we're going to have some very expensive and embarrassing egg on our collective faces.

Not to mention that we've had just made targets of any weather balloons we (or any other country) might launch should they stray over "foreign" territory.  Granted, countries like China, Russia, and the USA are huge and most balloons launched there will come down within the country of origin — but still, US balloons could easily overfly Mexico or Canada; and there are scads of European, Central American, and African nations that aren't even the same size in terms of area as the state of Texas.  A balloon launched in any of those countries — say, for example, France — could easily overfly a half-dozen other countries within the space of hours.

-"BB"-

I expect that most countries have neither the desire nor the ability to destroy a weather balloon at that altitude.

Shot down off coast of South Carolina! Take that Xi! Keep your nasty balloons to yourself!

Jarl, I suspect you've hit upon the only real reason the US military might have for shooting it down: just to prove they COULD do it.

What's the worst that could happen? An American version of a German music video?

That's not all that bad...





Either way...it's a fun little flashback.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY

The Year of the Rabbit....

They should "force major" Tim Tok, with the same end result.

-"BB"-