By Eva Fu
February 3, 2023 Updated: February 3, 2023
The United States could
bring down the Chinese surveillance balloon currently flying eastward across
the country by shooting it with a laser, which would cause it to gradually
descend without inflicting serious damage to civilians on the ground, according
to an aerospace specialist.
The Defense Department
previously ruled out shooting down the balloon, which was first spotted earlier
this week in Montana, saying that its size could cause a debris field large
enough to harm Americans.
But Art Thompson, CEO of
California-based company Sage Cheshire Aerospace which provides stratospheric
balloon launching and research services, believes that a “semi-controlled
descent” could be a solution. He was previously the technical director of the
Red Bull Stratos program, which in 2012 smashed records for the highest-ever
skydive, an endeavor that included the world’s largest manned balloon.
By firing a munition or
laser weapon, one can put holes in the balloon and force it to vent air.
“Knowing what the weather
patterns are, you could probably predict how fast you can get it to vent, in
which case it’s semi-controlled. [Then] you can get it to touch down relatively
softly, recover the equipment, and try to figure out exactly what this is,” he
told The Epoch Times.
“The trick is that it has
to be big enough to get the balloon to vent down and start dropping in
altitude. But it has to be small enough that it’s not going to just come
tumbling down or tear a giant hole out,” causing it to crash, he said.
This action, Thompson
believes, would be in the United States’ best interests. “Because once it gets
out of our control, you know, we’re never going to know exactly what it was
used for.”
The Chinese balloon was
first sighted above Montana, a state that houses intercontinental ballistic
missile silos, earlier this week. A top Pentagon official said on Friday that
the balloon is flying at 60,000 feet (18,300 meters), has the ability to
maneuver, and has changed course at some point during its flight, although he
wouldn’t specify when.
The Associated Press,
citing anonymous officials, reported that the balloon has the size of about
three school buses.
Defense Department
spokesperson Brigadier General Pat Ryder said the balloon has a “large payload
underneath the surveillance component” and could stay in the United States for
several more days as it moves eastward.
Radio Signals Intelligence
Thompson suspects the
balloon’s role has more to do with intercepting radio signals than collecting
visual information—such as radio frequencies relating to communication systems
or evaluating electromagnetic energy that can allow Beijing to interfere with
U.S. communication systems if something were to happen. Satellite footage from
Google Earth already provides the Chinese regime with plenty of photographic
images of U.S. terrain with high accuracy, he noted.
That said, “they aren’t
being very stealthy about it,” because the balloon uses a white shell that reflects
a lot of light, making it conspicuous when compared to those made with
StratoFilm, which is sheer and less reflective, like “a dry cleaner bag,” he
said.
The balloon has most
recently been sighted near Kansas City and several other parts of Missouri. A
local news report cited a pilot
seeing the balloon at an estimated 50,000 feet altitude, but suddenly dropped
by 20,000 feet in seconds—a description that surprised Thompson and made him
wonder if there’s already a hole in the balloon. Although he later noted that
the pilot’s estimate could be inaccurate, as such a dive would mean the balloon
is in a freefall, in which case it would have been on the ground by this point.
The National Weather
Service (NWS) in Kansas City, Missouri, at 12:30 p.m. local time posted photos
of the balloon, saying it was visible from their office in Pleasant Hill and
the Kansas City metropolitan area.
“We have confirmed that
it is not an NWS weather balloon,” it said on Twitter.
The U.S. Air Force
received its first high-energy laser weapon that can fit on a tactical fighter
jet last June. The U.S. Navy also has ground-based laser systems that
can attack targets on air, although Thompson noted that they might not be
immediately available to deploy in the area needed for use.
The United States has
missed its best opportunity to bring it down, Thompson said. That’d be earlier
in the week when it was flying over sparsely-populated areas.
But an alternative, he
said, is to wait until the balloon leaves the coast but is still within U.S.
territorial waters before shooting it down, and then getting the Coast Guard to
retrieve it, which would pose the most minimal amount of civilian damage.
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