Information, can we jam a balloon like that from the ground by targeting it with signals or would they have just covered up things that were on the ground or maybe moved the b2s into hangars? we can do all those things, john. we have experience, because we were under the open skies regime for a number of years, by the way, i would note during the trump administration, i pushed to get out of the open skies agreement, we felt russia was conducting unauthorized surveillance against our critical sites, so we have some practice doing that. but again, i don t think we know what they gathered. clearly they thought it was so important or were not getting enough information from the overhead satellites in space they felt the need to float a balloon, and balloons provide persistence that satellites don t. secondly, we need to see what was in the instrumentation package, signals collection gear it had, measurement gear it had,
0 out because it was jammed. are we to believe that this didn t get any communications out back to beijing because it was effectively jammed all the way through by either the intelligence agencies or the military? yeah, well, dealing with the first thing, it s obvious, i think, given the action we took against these three unidentified objects, we did not act accordingly when air space was about to be violated by the spy balloon in alaska, did not shoot it down, that reacted in i think what may be an overreaction to the others. he has to be absolutely clear what we are going to do about it. i don t think he s going to fess up to the fact that they may have made a mistake in permitting it to go across the united states. i believe he did, he s going to get questions around that. in terms of what did we learn and did we shut them down, i m not a technology expert but my gut tells me we would never know for sure about that until we get ahold of the devices which we have in our hands now a
We don t really know what the americans, if anything, were able to jam or block as it flew along. but what sorts of things might the payload reveal once the americans get it off the ocean floor? well, that largely depends on just what the shape of the payload is. i mean, it s fallen from 60,000 feet, as you saw in the shoot-down video. the payload, the instrumentation package, and the solar paneled separated from the balloon itself, which was ruptured by the sidewinder shot. so it would have been falling at a terminal velocity, about 225 feet per second. so it would have hit the water fairly hard. we don t know just what shape the payload would be in. but assuming some of it is intact, it would give the u.s. and its allies some understanding of what sort of signals intelligence and electronic intelligence-gathering capabilities the chinese would have for that particular type of
Balloon? a story they are sticking to. do you buy it? well, thanks, michael. no, i don t buy it at all. when you look at this balloon before it was shot down by the f-22, it was a fairly sophisticated platform, had a large set of solar arrays that were powering an instrumentation package underneath the balloon itself. that doesn t sound very much like a weather balloon to me. and the very fact that this balloon was floated over sensitive u.s. military sites, it would have been an ideal platform to gather signals, intelligence, rather than necessarily taking photos. so i think the chinese claim that this is somehow an innocent weather balloon gone off course is frankly nonsense. tell us more about what you military types call sigant? a satellite is in orbit, it s moving in orbital velocities,