Abrahamsson is a business developer at the Esrange space base outside Kiruna, where they have extensive experience working with high-altitude balloons. He estimates that the balloon that passes through US airspace without permission is 50-100 meters in diameter and filled with helium. It can carry a load of several tons and stay in the air for several weeks.
– A balloon like this is like a vehicle that can basically be loaded with whatever equipment you want. That it would be carrying some kind of surveillance equipment that one wants to test is certainly not unlikely, but it could just as well be a meteorological thing.
USA: “Can change course”
The Pentagon claims that the balloon has demonstrated that it can change course and that it carries surveillance equipment. Among other things, it has been aimed at a nuclear weapons base in Montana, and the military has taken several measures to make their activities more difficult to detect from the air. At the same time, it has been decided not to shoot down the balloon, among other things due to the risk of parts falling down and injuring people.
China has confirmed that the balloon belongs to them but claims it is civilian with a mission to collect meteorological data. In the statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is written that the balloon “deviated far from the planned course” due to winds and that it was an accident. At the same time, it condemns American politicians and the media, which it claims are using the incident to “attack and discredit China”.
On Saturday morning American time, the balloon is expected to reach the state of North Carolina, and then blow out over the Atlantic. According to ABC News the military is considering shooting it down when it is over the sea.
Equivalent to satellite
According to Mattias Abrahamsson, it is possible to remotely navigate an unmanned balloon by changing the flight height between different air layers and wind directions. At the same time, it is not uncommon for the contact to be broken and the balloon to go completely out of control.
Spying using a hot air balloon may sound out of date, but Mattias Abrahamsson believes that a surveillance balloon and a spy satellite are fairly equivalent when it comes to being able to discover and map things down on the ground. And that the balloon even has advantages.
– It is significantly cheaper to send up and can stay longer over the same point on the earth’s surface than a satellite that passes by at high speed. But that requires that the winds blow correctly.