flights until now. they didn t disclose this one until people over in manhattan noticed it flying overhead. basically it seems like this was a cat and mouse game between chinese and american intelligence agencies going on for a while that they chose not to make public. that s a question you ll hear both democrats and republicans ask on the hill. yeah. i m wondering if there were also balloons over and over latin america as well. that s something we have to be looking out for. the president issued this tweet of him preparing for the state of the union tomorrow night. there you see the notebook, some cookies and coffee possibly. what are you going to be looking out for tomorrow? look, this is the first state of the union that the president has delivered in this new era of divided government. instead of having two democrats behind him and a vice president and speaker of the house, he ll have a republican speaker behind him, a republican house majority
does it have some kind of steering mechanism? we can speculate at this point. we ll know a lot more about that as the pieces of this thing get put together. don t forget, nasa, for example, was able to exhaustively reconstruct challenger which blew up at a much higher altitude and was scattered over thousands and thousands of miles. we ll learn, i think, some answers to those questions. my guess would be this had limited capability to maneuver because it s just a hard problem set to have an enormous determiningable like this and move it with real precision. i think we ll skoofr it had some capability, but it was also overmastered at times by the winds. i think it s going to end up being a bit of both, jose. admiral, the chinese government reacted by saying it was, quote, an obvious
but don t mess with any of the debris. the department of defense is working with local law enforcement to recover as much debris as possible, any equipment to gain insight into those chinese spying capabilities. george solis, thank you. admiral stavridis, what can you tell us. you know the admiral will sat s the u.s. navy recovering that balloon and that debris. it will be quickly handed off to our wonderful cleanse community partners. they ll look for three big things, jose. number one, the technology itself. how sophisticated is this? was it able to connect directly to satellites? did it store information on board? number two, perhaps most importantly, we re going to try
biden administration shot down off the coast of myrtle beach, south carolina. an f-22 fighter jet shot down the balloon on saturday a week after u.s. officials first detected it going over alaska. u.s. military and law enforcement personnel are combing an area of about seven nat call miles. here is new footage possibly showing the balloon s debris. joining us is nbc s george solace in myrtle beach, south carolina. also with us, amiral james stavridis. george, what more can you tell us about the recovery efforts right now? reporter: good morning, jose. we know navy divers and recovery ships are out there in the motion trying to get more of that debris and possibly equipment that was attached to that balloon. the warning from officials here in the carolinas is, if some of that debris starts to wash onshore, to remind the people and the tourists not to touch