Would you like to spy with my beautiful balloon?

Ooooh, that's some shade!

It’s sort of mine. The mirror problem was caused by an incorrectly assembled null correction lens unit (the lens was positioned off spec by 1.3mm, leading the outer edge being ground too flat by 2000-ish nm), not for lack of a good enough lens. And the instrument was replaced with corrective mirrors, not lenses. Hubble is related to spy satellites in that the mirror vendor also made the same model mirrors for spy satellites (KH-7 and KH-11, IIRC). I don’t remember the details on the NRO satellites offered to NASA but I think they were used as land observatories, not deep space telescopes. Might have the same mirrors too, but I can’t say for sure.

We [the Chinese] would never use a spy balloon to infiltrate and monitor America. That's what Tik Tok is for.

-- Bill Maher this week

Now that it's been pointed out that Trump was too busy whacking off (or trying to find some whack off material) in the White House to do anything about Chinese balloon airspace violations on three different equations and guys like Marco Rubio have ended up looking even more stupid than usual after they tried to smear Biden for "waiting too long" to shoot this one done, will the MAGAts shut up about it, or just keep trotting out the same bullshit and hope their idiot followers don't notice?

The latter.

Yup.

They have no decency Sir.

The Moosylvania region between the U.S. and Canada is highly contested. The Canadians insist it belongs to the U.S. whilst the U.S. insists it belongs to Canada. I suspect the Canadians will claim this is a U.S. balloon whilst the Americans will swear-and-be-damned it's Canadian. International diplomacy can be a very delicate business.

Seems obvious to me - did all along - that if you want the most information, you splash it, not crash it, so that you can recover and examine the hardware and possibly even pull data.

It’s surprising to me that we don’t have a better way of bringing it down softly than shooting it with a missile over water. Like, don’t we have our own balloons? Send up a balloon with a harpoon to make a small hole, or collide and entangle with the other balloon and then pop our balloon so the other is too heavy and can’t maintain altitude, then catch it with a helicopter on the way down if it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a soft landing.

The people complaining that Biden didn't shoot it down quick enough are probably the sort that would fall for the flaming bag of dog shit on the front porch prank, and then call the shit "poop."

Protip: If the doorbell rings, you answer it, and there's a brown paper lunch bag that's on fire sitting on your porch, there is a 100% chance the bag is full of dog shit. Go get some water or a fire extinguisher, or smother it with the welcome mat.

But, what if someone put sodium or something else that reacts with water in the bag instead of shit? No one who would think to do that would pull a prank this lame. It's dog shit in there.

99 Spy Balloons

Shoot one down, pass it around,
98 spy balloons in the air?

Navy Releases Up-Close Pics of Chinese Spy Balloon Retrieval

Great, now tell us what was in it and what they were surveying.

1) A lot of hot air
2) America, unsuccessfully.

It's your soulmate!!

Sounds like a threesome with his mom's corpse.

Too soon? For the balloon I mean.

At those altitudes I imagine it's really hard to do a 2 balloon intercept, and it was a massive payload being carried. Very very difficult to do a controlled descent of it, and also very dangerous to fly a helicopter near a large falling item that is trailing ropes and scraps of balloon and god knows what.

I imagine there is also the unknowns about what abilities it has. Could easily have some kind of quick payload release or balloon pop functionality that would have added to the risk of trying to catch it in a predictable fashion, with the ability of the Chinese to deny triggering anything and say it was due to the interference.

At this point the funniest option to my mind is if it turns out to be a troll/test by China and it does turn out to be an overly large weather/atmospheric conditions monitoring platform.

I don't think it's funny and that's the most probable option anyway... although the gear onboard could just as easily be a bunch of non-functioning techno garbage that's meant to look high-tech.

In summary:

1) With over 1,000 imaging satellites in orbit around the earth, the locations of our military facilities haven't been secret for a long time.

2) We knew exactly where the balloon was, and since it was a balloon, it wasn't exactly moving quickly. This made it a relatively trivial matter to take steps to avoid letting it see anything we didn't want it to.

3) We are also perfectly capable of jamming a spy balloon's ability to transmit information about anything it does see that we don't want it to.

The Republican faux outrage over this is nothing more than political opportunism designed to fool people who aren't particularly good at critical thinking.

Let us not forget google has driven down all of our streets and taken pictures of everything that we have no control over.

Oh, and as I am learning if you have the pics on your phone and cloud everyone who has access to those systems already has all of them. Interesting thing I found out is that hackers working with the bank and your phone company use those pictures of your house to try and sello it from under you by stealing your identity.

I do not give a fuck about a balloon from China when american corporations work with criminals to use your phone and google to steal your shit.

Where's a Batplane when you really need one?

You just described the entire political operation of the Republican Party. Because that's their entire voter base.