The no vote is me. Real talk is that if we were shooting it down we should have shot it down over Montana, it wouldn't have hit jack crap. If we're being real real, they should have shot it down when it crossed into our airspace off the Pacific coast, the government knew it was there.
Agee with that, but my assumption is we had reasons for keeping it afloat related to observation/intelligence/research. Of course I’m not aware of the military providing such a justification, but I also wouldn’t expect them to.
You're probably right. I don't see what there is to lose by telling the Americans, worried about a spy balloon flying over the country, that we're keeping it up to perform counter intelligence. It's not like China doesn't know that's exactly what we were doing.
Ultimately, this is not a big deal, as most people know, we are being spied on in a hell of a lot more direct ways than a balloon and by a hell of a lot more governments than China.
We are spied upon from Space primarily because we prefer as do our potential adversaries to only have a very limited space war . . . and there is a very limited space war. Killer satellites tracking spy satellites, development of ground and sub-orbital anti-satellite systems, the U.S. and others using lasers to blind satellites when they fly over sensitive installations, research into space based kinetic energy weapons etc. etc. etc.
Nobody is attempting to spy on us from 50K feet . . . besides the Chinese (as far as we know)
So the whole "it's no big deal, they spy on us from space" is just a deflection and I've documented why low altitude spying can be very effective in this blog, and how our very own DOD has and continues to research spy balloons and balloon based technology platforms.
Poll