On 16 December 1784 – barely a year after the first crewed flight – a British cartoonist published a sketch entitled The Battle of the Balloons, depicting airships belonging to the leading powers of the day firing cannons at each other from among the clouds. In his book Falling Upwards, Richard Holmes adduces the drawing as evidence of the intimate relationship between balloons and military competition, with, for instance, the first French company of aeronauts formed on the remarkably early date of 29 March 1794. Today we might contemplate another…
Tag: Satellites
Navy Divers Work to Recover Debris From Chinese Spy Balloon
WASHINGTON — Navy divers were working to locate portions of the debris from the Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down six miles off the coast of South Carolina, defense officials said on Sunday. The recovery effort, which is expected to take days, began not long after debris from the balloon hit the water, a defense official said. He added that a Navy ship arrived on the scene soon after the balloon was shot down, and that other Navy and Coast Guard ships, which had been put…
U.S. Detects Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon Hovering Over Northwest
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed his trip to China after a surveillance balloon was detected flying over the U.S. Read the latest. WASHINGTON — The United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northwestern United States, the Pentagon said on Thursday, a discovery that comes days before Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s visit to Beijing. President Biden has chosen, for now, not to shoot down the balloon after a recommendation from Pentagon officials that doing so would…
International Space Station Dodges Chinese Space Junk
On Wednesday, about six hours before NASA’s Crew-3 mission launched to orbit, the International Space Station was forced to maneuver itself to avoid a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite weapon test in 2007. The piece of junk was projected to enter what’s called the “pizza box,” a square-shaped zone 2.5 miles deep and 30 miles wide, where the station sits in the middle. NASA officials keep close eyes on the zone using data models on the location of objects in space kept by the U.S. Space Command.…