hello and welcome. coming to you live from studio 4 at the cnn center in atlanta, i m michael holmes. appreciate your company. coming up on cnn newsroom i ordered the pentagon to shoot it down on wednesday as soon as possible. the u.s. has shot down a suspected chinese spy balloon after it traveled across america for days. recovery efforts now under way. china says the balloon entered u.s. air space by accident, heightening already tense relations between washington and beijing. live in hong kong with the latest from there. it s not the only one. the pentagon says a second balloon is flying over latin america. a report ahead. live from cnn center, this is cnn newsroom with michael holmes. we br to show you the dramatic moment a u.s. sidewinder missile took out the suspected chinese spy balloon that has caused so much havoc this week. the balloon was so high up, nearly 12 miles or 20 kilometers, that it took a few seconds for the shockwave to reach the grou
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,