live in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta in washington. residents in and around myrtle beach are told not to collect debris from a downed chinese spy bloochblt that comes as we are getting one of the best looks yet at the shootdown of the balloon. you re looking at the footage right now. our u.s. fighter jets fired a single missile to crash the craft. right now military crews are scrambling to recover the wreckage. most of it sitting in 47 feet of water. oren lieberman is at the pentagon for us. back to the video we just got from c infer n in the last several minutes just to highlight the clearest image yet that we have where you can see the balloon is popped, essentially, destroyed. you can clearly see what appears to know the surveillance equipment dropping very quickly into the atlantic ocean. i suppose that gives the military, the pentagon, some hope that what they are hoping to retrieve out of the atlantic is salvageable and may offer some clues as to what the chinese we
60,000 feet and then hit the water so that might have broken up quite a bit of it. but senior officials say it fell in 47 feet of water which isn t that bad as far as recovery. some of it may have broken up as it came down. but the recovery effort is underway. navy and coast guard vessels in the area. a salvage vessel is going to start pulling it out of the water and then see what intelligence you can get out of it. the technology, how they controlled it, how they operated it. all of that becomes the mission. with it already being down. noting that the intelligence side was already begun when this was in the air. the pentagon believes it was able to stop the chinese from surveilling too much with this and then flipped it around. looked at it as it was going and tried to gather as much intel about it as it was moving along. so far they believe they were successful in that effort. so it will be fascinating to learn what we can learn.
rocket. also, condensation from the balloon filled with helium. that s not the important part. this is. how far did it go. this fell from above 60,000 feet. let s say it is going 120 miles an hour, which will be terminal velocity for a skydiver. might be faster than that. that would be a five-minute fall. and it would hit with a lot of force. then we know from what we ve seen that it hit somewhere in this general area in here. and that is where it landed about 47 feet of water. so what is involved in the process of recovering this? 47 feet is not bad. even beginning divers can go that far. this kind of work is very pain-staking. every official report you read about underwater recovery says people underestimate how much time it will take. even though they have good weather for the next few days in that area, they ll be working on a moving surface. so the first thing is to go
survey under the water with cameras. robotic vehicles may be used because it would allow people above and even on land to survey it. they have to establish a priority list. what do they really want to keep together? this could weigh several thousand pounds. if you want to get it up carefully, what do you have to protect? then you have to figure where you re going to attach cranes to it. where you might have to use inflatable airbags to lift it. will you try to lift it all together or in separate parts? how could you get it up knowing the mas you get to the surface, the weight distribution will change, especially if any parts of it are holding water. so what they re going to have is people who are experts in this. this is not something that anyone should undertake anywhere without experience. certainly not in something as important as this. think of it as an underwater crime scene.
we re back with the latest on the chinese spy balloon shot down by the u.s. military off the coast of south carolina. navy divers will assist as needed in recovering the balloon from the atlantic ocean. there are also unmanned vessels that can help retrieve it and bring it to the recovery ship. a senior military official says the debris is in primarily 47 feet of water. tom, walk us through where the balloon went down. how the recovery efforts may play out. we have some very clear video of what happened when it all went down. it reveals a lot. it really does. if you watch this go up, it gets hit, this is the really showy part. it is this part right down here that matters. that appears to be the payload dropping away. this is smoke maybe from the