you re live in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta. we are following breaking news at this hour. the president declaring moments ago that he ordered the pentagon to shoot down the chinese spy balloon as soon as possible. the u.s. is in a recovery effort after a u.s. fighter jet launched a precision strike on the chinese spy balloon. it came after days of watching it float from montana, to missouri to the carolinas. here is another video of that strike. this is a tense moment in u.s./china relations. the world will be watching in the hours and days ahead. let s get straight to cnn s oren liebermann at the pentagon. oren, what more are you learning? i understand you were listening to officials explain how all of this went down. what can you tell us? it started on wednesday when president joe biden gave the authorization to shoot down the chinese balloo n as soon as possible. there were tankers and others to shoot this down. it was an f-22 that fired an a 9 side wind er. the ai
a pretty interesting choice and it actually, you know, is kind of unchartered waters in the sort of theory of escalation between powers, right? because this hasn t really happened before and it s a really interesting experiment of sort of how far you can push the envelope and kind of ruffling feathers without putting yourself, airmen at immediate risk. all right. arthur holland michelle, thank you very much for your time. we re all going to be keeping our eyes on this. thanks for your insights. we appreciate it. great to be here. coming up next as i just mentioned, the ground stop issue while the u.s. military shot down the spy balloon has been issued. how this affected commercial air traffic. that s next. because only tempuc uses our one-o-of-a-kind, incredibly adaptptive tempur® material.