Originally published at: White House says it was probably weather balloons | Boing Boing
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MTG in the near future: “The Biden administration is wasting tax payer dollars on overpriced ordinance to destroy weather balloons! This administration is anti-science!”
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Good luck with that. Helium is super-scarce and expensive right now.
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the White House, have assured the public that whatever we’ve been shooting down is probably just weather balloons conducting research
NOAA headquarters be like
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Why are we not hearing from the entities launching these then? I’d think they’d be screaming by now. If professional, these probably are beau coup expensive. Speaking of expense, these missiles aren’t party favors (to pop balloons?).
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hydrogen is fine.
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What could go wrong?
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maybe we need some sort of gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium. then everyone is happy 
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Works for me!
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If it is weather balloons (or other research balloons), you would think that their status could be easily verified. Like, if you are launching a weather balloon, don’t you have to file a notice with some kind of aviation authority with information on size, anticipated altitude, etc?
Also, if it’s true, Chinese propagandists will have a field day with it. Government wasting taxpayer dollars? Getting North Americans to panic? Government doing things based on political expediency rather than hard information? Unfortunately it is a bad look no matter how you slice it.
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If I was in the business of launching weather balloons I’d probably stay pretty hush-hush about it right now just to avoid making myself a target for the crazies.
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I was gonna suggest Russian oligarchs trying to fly their assets out of the country. Think we should start a rumor?
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Well, maybe not from Amazon…
I’m not sure if this one would be 200’ at altitude. So, probably best to make your own…
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Sweet Jesus, an AIM-9X costs a fraction under half a million dollars. And now we’re using them two at a time to blow up lost weather balloons.
No wonder we can’t afford schools or hospitals.
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Yeah, the largest I can find on Amazon is only about 8.5 meters (around 28’) in diameter, so no where near the 200’ estimate of the one that set off this whole mess. Still, it’s relatively large and might be fun to float one of them over the homes of some of the paranoid RWNJs out there. I mean, certainly don’t do such a thing because that would be wrong.
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Has anyone considered the great big balloon was having baby balloons as it traveled across the world?
I wonder if I should call somebody in case they didn’t think about that
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So annoying that those quack pilots won’t admit that it’s a weather balloons…
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‘I wouldn’t really call it a balloon… I don’t know what… I can see it outside with my eyes,’ one of the pilots can be heard saying.
‘Looks like something… there’s some kind of object that’s distended… it’s hard to tell, it’s pretty small,’ he says.
‘I’m gonna call it like a container,’ says one of the pilots. 'Can’t really tell though what the shape is.
‘The size of it, that would be challenging, it’s so slow and so small, I just can’t see it.’
‘In the targeting pod, I can’t tell if it’s metallic or what, but I can see like lines coming down below it, but I can’t see anything below it,’ says one pilot.
One says it looked ‘black-ish’, while the other says ‘it looks dark, but I can get a pretty good sun glint off of it.’
