[HN Gopher] Balloon Wars (2010)
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Balloon Wars (2010)
Author : perihelions
Score : 50 points
Date : 2023-02-05 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (steveblank.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com)
| amelius wrote:
| I was looking at the moon yesterday evening, and briefly thought
| that it was another spy balloon ...
| snozolli wrote:
| _SKYHOOK balloons, funded by the Office of Naval Research, were
| designed to stay at a fixed altitude (~100,000 feet) and carry a
| payload of thousands of pounds._
|
| It blows my mind that thousands of pounds could be held aloft at
| that altitude.
| perihelions wrote:
| Interesting twist of history: the photographic film from one of
| these balloons' cameras ended up on a Soviet space probe, and
| exposed humanity's first picture of the far side of the moon.
|
| - _" The film, temperature-resistant and radiation-hardened, came
| from American Genetrix balloons which had been recovered by the
| Soviets.[15]"_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_3#Lunar_photography
|
| According to one of the Soviet space program engineers (writing
| publicly in 1993), this was an unauthorized, renegade act, done
| without knowledge of the Soviet government,
|
| - _" Why was the thought "crazy"? Yes, because in space, as in
| the "defense", at that time nothing foreign was allowed.
| Literally everything - materials, instruments, technologies - had
| to be only domestic. It was part of the flesh and blood, in the
| minds of the developers, becoming their ideology. If I had only
| hinted to someone about the possibility of using an American
| film, I would be mistaken for a foolish joker or even for a
| person who was not completely normal. Only two people knew about
| this venture - me and Volodya Kondratyev, who was engaged in the
| chemical processes of the Yenisei. We cut an American
| 180-millimeter film to 35 millimeters, then punched it. We wrote
| "technical conditions of the film type AB-1", which after having
| been shown to the military representatives was filed in the
| appropriate folder with the stamp "top secret". Of course, we
| both stayed silent. What would become of us if this story was
| revealed, I can not say. In any case, not only in cosmonautics,
| but in general, I think we would not have worked for a long time
| ... " "_
|
| http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/luna3/SpyBalloon.htm ( _"
| Article from the newspaper "St. Petersburg Vedomosti" of April
| 10, 1993. by Igor Borisovich Lisochkin."_)
| gumby wrote:
| My favorite irony about the space race was the difference
| between how the two programs operated.
|
| The US had a huge, centrally-planned program managed by the
| government.
|
| While the Russian program was chronically underfunded and had
| limited politburo support. They had to produced products to
| barter for other things they needed. And they had a capricious
| "customer" with bizarre requirements (as with the local content
| one above) and who only cared about one thing. Basically
| perpetually a startup.
|
| In essence each country's program was organized the way you
| would have expected the _other_ country's program to have been
| run.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > The US had a huge, centrally-planned program managed by the
| government.
|
| As recently pointed out to me by a comment here on HN, that's
| also how the USA conducted defense manufacturing during WWII.
| cs702 wrote:
| _> In the 1950's the U.S. Military and the CIA enlisted balloons
| (some as tall as a 40-story building) as weapons systems
| targeting the Soviet Union._
|
| If caught, the US government might have said that those balloons
| were actually scientific civilian devices that had accidentally
| veered off-course "due to force majeure" and that it was just an
| unhappy coincidence that they had floated mainly over sensitive
| Soviet military installations.
|
| What else could they have said to save face?
| capableweb wrote:
| > If caught, the US government might have said that those
| balloons were actually scientific civilian devices that had
| accidentally veered off-course "due to force majeure" and that
| it was just an unhappy coincidence that they had floated mainly
| over sensitive Soviet military installations.
|
| Wouldn't that be very easy to disprove if you took down the
| balloon some way and inspect the contents? They'll surely be
| differently built if were indeed civilian vs military.
|
| Also, not sure how saying "we don't know how
| weather/aeronautics works" is saving much face. We (humans)
| been doing ballooning since something like the 1800s if not
| earlier, modern balloons surely would have equipment on it to
| understand where they are going, and if going in the wrong way,
| automatically sink to the ground to be "rescued" before
| drifting too far away.
|
| Edit: seems parent was referencing a real-life event that I was
| unaware of, I thought we were discussing a hypothetical
| scenario. Ignore me.
| cs702 wrote:
| It was a reference to this:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-foreign-
| ministry-a...
| techdragon wrote:
| The problem is in taking down the balloon. It's notionally
| operating in such a way that it's ambiguous as to its intent.
| If it quacks like a high altitude science balloon, it could
| either be a high altitude scientific balloon or a military
| surveillance platform designed to imitate a high altitude
| surveillance balloon...
|
| The US defence establishment and executive branch are likely
| currently evaluating in deep detail every facet of this, and
| the entire history of this going back to Cold War era stuff
| like the program of balloons that lead to the whole Roswell
| incident... military balloons looking like science balloons
| is firmly in the "we did it before! How much of a leg to
| stand on do we have?"
|
| I expect they will tolerate it, and amplify a few teams by a
| person or two, in order to know ahead of time where these
| will be and to treat them as they do existing satellites that
| spy from higher up. They avoid many sensitive operations when
| surveillance is overhead as part of routine operational
| security best practices... to the point where they
| occasionally "make mistakes" in effort to sow false flags.
|
| TLDR... it's just a new surveillance platform and there's
| existing precedent for how to deal with this kind of threat,
| by the military... the politicians will just do the usual
| shit show attention seeking nonsense they always do.
| [deleted]
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Look here[0] for what they _did_ say during a similar incident.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident
| theptip wrote:
| So, claiming it was for meteorological research:
|
| > Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident
| as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated
| by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose
| a few days later after the Soviet government produced the
| captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment,
| including photographs of Soviet military bases.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Weapons systems ... no. Reconnaissance/surveillance systems, but
| not weapons.
|
| That "weapon system" was used on US paperwork, most likely for
| purposes of internal security, does not turn a balloon into an
| actual weapon deployed over an adversary's airspace. Definitions
| matter when it comes to acts of war.
|
| The word "tank" comes from a similar cover story.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I always kind of wondered if
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC might've been dual use.
| dang wrote:
| A tiny bit of discussion at the time (of the article):
|
| _Steve Blank: Balloon Wars_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1083895 - Jan 2010 (2
| comments)
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