Shooting Down Party Balloons! By Charles Taylor (Florida)
The balloon issue, as covered at the blog, is no joke, since these old, but still relevant vehicles of war are able to dominate near space, the area from 12 to 62 miles above the Earth’s surface, a region too high for jets, but too low for satellites. A good view of a country can be had from there.
Still, to troll the US the way it is doing to the Taiwanese, releasing a number of balloons, and as well, letting the first one go right over the US, has led to a sense of balloon paranoia, with the shooting down of what some have said is a party balloon, or a school science project. Still, while this is good material for jokes, the said balloon was in aircraft space, and could have posed a danger, so better safe than sorry. At least the $ 400,000 missiles seem to work.
“Sen. Ted Cruz took to Twitter Thursday to criticize President Joe Biden for ordering an F-22 fighter jet to shoot down what may have been a hobby club’s science project off the coast of Alaska earlier last week.
Cruz, R-Texas, joked that Biden’s decision to authorize the $200 million fighter jet to use a $400,000 missile to shoot down what may have been a $12 balloon serves as a "powerful deterrence" to high school students interested in creating their own at-home science balloons.
The comment came after the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade’s (NIBBB), an Illinois-based hobbyist club, said their pico balloon that was floating off the west coast of Alaska went missing the same day a Lockheed Martin jet shot down an unidentified object matching its description.
"To be fair, Biden is providing is powerful deterrence for any high school science clubs that might try to invade America…." Cruz wrote on Twitter.
"President Biden needs to tell the American people whether this is true," Cruz added in a separate tweet.
The club’s globe-trotting balloon, which was last reported to be hovering at 38,910 ft. on Feb. 10, may have been one of three unidentified aerial objects the U.S. Air Force shot out of the sky via the president’s authorization between Feb. 10-12.
The group said that its trajectory put it directly over the central Yukon Territory on Feb. 11, where an object was shot out of the sky.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said the objects shot down Feb. 10-12 may not have been from China or another foreign country but "could just be balloons."
"I can confirm that the Department of Defense was tracking a high-altitude object over Alaska airspace in the last 24 hours. The object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight. Out of an abundance of caution and the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object. And they did. And it came in inside our territorial waters," Kirby added during Friday's White House press briefing.”
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