[wvoch235]

This was my first thought as well. I'm kind of surprised the media is making such a big deal out of this. I would assume, considering how cheap it is to make a stratospheric balloon, it is either fairly common and the US has an equivalent program or its completely inferior to satellites.

The technology is pretty mature, Google ran a whole fleet of them with Project Loon back in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC

[uoaei]

> The technology is pretty mature

Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature.

Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.

[nygardkillsquad]

Wasn't one theory about Roswell that it was some kind of test balloon with crash test dummies? Something about testing for radiation in the upper atmosphere back before everyone and their brother knew how to make a gun style nuclear device?

(Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)