(02-04-2023, 08:38 AM)727Sky Wrote: The military of the USA says there will be no shoot down of the Chinese balloon which is currently over the USA at an altitude of around 62,000 feet. They supposedly tracked the balloon from China across the Pacific and where it crossed into Alaska, Canada, and finally someplace over Montana, USA. You would think the USA would want to know what type of devices the balloon is carrying but "NO" I guess that might interrupt their woke gender classes or something ? At 62,000 ft they would have to send 4 or more balloons which would end up at different locations to do a complete lights out in the USA via an EMP... Which hopefully they are not that stupid as our ships at sea and submarines have a bite all their own,,,yet... there really are some terribly stupid people around the world in leadership positions.

Quote:By September of 1947, incoming reports of sightings had become too profuse for the Air Force to ignore. That month, in a classified communiqué, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining advised the commanding general of the armed forces that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” The “Twining memo,” which has since gained ecclesiastical stature among ufologists, articulated concerns that some foreign rival—say, the Soviet Union—had made an unimaginable technological breakthrough, and it initiated a classified study, Project Sign, to investigate. Its officials were evenly split between those who thought that the “flying discs” were of plausibly “interplanetary” origin and those who chalked up the sightings to rampant misperception. On the one hand, according to a memo, a full twenty per cent of U.F.O. reports lacked ordinary explanations. On the other hand, there was no dispositive evidence—the wreckage of a crashed saucer, perhaps—and, as a scientist at the RAND Corporation reasoned, interstellar travel was simply infeasible.
...
The following January, the C.I.A. secretly convened an advisory group of experts, led by Howard P. Robertson, a mathematical physicist from Caltech. The “Robertson panel” determined not that we were being visited by U.F.O.s but that we were being inundated with too many U.F.O. reports. This was a real problem: if notices of genuine incursions over U.S. territory could be lost in a maelstrom of kooky hallucination, there could be grave consequences for national security—for instance, Soviet spy planes could operate with impunity. The Cold War made it crucial that the U.S. government be perceived to have full control over its airspace.

Quote:The story of the destruction of the American D-21 drone

On March 20, 1971, a mysterious aircraft crashed in the forest of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, China. The wreckage was scattered widely, and the main body fell on a slope in a forest clearing and was broken into several pieces. Among the large amount of scattered debris collected by the masses is a nylon cloth "hat", which is half the size of a basketball. Some people wonder how the driver's head can be so big.

Judging from the flight performance at that time, Chinese searchers thought it was a US military SR-71 high-speed reconnaissance aircraft, and the "hat" was an obvious evidence. If the SR-71 crashed, the pilot must have landed in our country! The local area sent hundreds of border militiamen to search for the pilot and the two large engines of the SR-71.

(02-04-2023, 11:18 PM)Bally002 Wrote: Seems the balloon has been shot down.  Taking down by the US Northern Command fighters.

Wonder what happens next.

Bally  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRYflEfWdaI

(02-05-2023, 01:01 AM)727Sky Wrote:

(02-04-2023, 11:18 PM)Bally002 Wrote: Seems the balloon has been shot down.  Taking down by the US Northern Command fighters.

Wonder what happens next.

Bally  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRYflEfWdaI

They use a half million dollar missile to destroy the balloon when a few rounds of 20mm would have done the job and actually left something to inspect. Once again demonstrating the stupidity of those in charge and giving orders IMO.

Quote:China balloon: US shoots down airship over Atlantic

'The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites
across America. The Department of Defence confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon
over US territorial waters.


'How dare you do this in your own air space?!'

China's foreign ministry later expressed "strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US's use of
force to attack civilian unmanned aircraft". Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling
to the sea after a small explosion.

An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile - an AIM-9X Sidewinder - and
it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 14:39 EST (19:39 GMT), a defence official
told reporters.

Defence officials told US media the debris landed in 47ft (14m) of water - shallower than they had
expected - near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The military is now trying to recover debris which is
spread over seven miles (11km). Two naval ships, including one with a heavy crane for recovery,
are in the area...'

(02-05-2023, 05:08 AM)Bally002 Wrote:

(02-05-2023, 01:01 AM)727Sky Wrote:

(02-04-2023, 11:18 PM)Bally002 Wrote: Seems the balloon has been shot down.  Taking down by the US Northern Command fighters.

Wonder what happens next.

Bally  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRYflEfWdaI

They use a half million dollar missile to destroy the balloon when a few rounds of 20mm would have done the job and actually left something to inspect. Once again demonstrating the stupidity of those in charge and giving orders IMO.

I thought the latest AIM were a couple of million.

With the 20mm, I guess the F22 would be capable.  Cheaper option.  Would depend on the range and height I think.

Kind regards,

Bally

(02-10-2023, 10:06 AM)727Sky Wrote:

---

(02-05-2023, 05:08 AM)Bally002 Wrote:

(02-05-2023, 01:01 AM)727Sky Wrote:

(02-04-2023, 11:18 PM)Bally002 Wrote: Seems the balloon has been shot down.  Taking down by the US Northern Command fighters.

Wonder what happens next.

Bally  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRYflEfWdaI

They use a half million dollar missile to destroy the balloon when a few rounds of 20mm would have done the job and actually left something to inspect. Once again demonstrating the stupidity of those in charge and giving orders IMO.

I thought the latest AIM were a couple of million.

With the 20mm, I guess the F22 would be capable.  Cheaper option.  Would depend on the range and height I think.

Kind regards,

Bally

The latest figures I got was the missile was 380,000 $ but... being the MIC your thinking is not all that wrong. The video I posted has some of the cost breakdowns of the operation which "true to form" was stupid expensive even for our military..

The balloon had a payload capacity of an estimated 7000 pounds.

Quote:It is understood that in 2018 China’s state television CCTV broadcast footage of a high-altitude balloon test that launched what appeared to be a hypersonic weapon.

The video shows a high-altitude balloon carrying three wedge-shaped payloads, like a hypersonic launch vehicle (HGVS), to a certain height and then dropping them.
The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) has previously reported that the HGV that crashed in a balloon was part of China’s efforts to develop warheads for hypersonic weapons.

A wedge-shaped payload similar to a design disclosed in 2017 by CCTV is believed to be linked to the DF-ZF HGV hypersonic missile. This weapon can shoot between Mach 5 to 10 and manoeuvre to avoid enemy resistance. The Dong Feng -17 (DF-17) intercontinental ballistic missile can carry the DF-ZF HGV, which has a range of 1,800 – 2,500 km.
However, hypersonic missiles may not be China’s first choice for now. There is another argument on the table. It is considered that China could use high-altitude balloons to carry out a nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack.

The biggest threat is sending one or more of these high-altitude balloons to the US with small nuclear EMP devices. The high-altitude detonation, which could knock out power and communications across the US, wreaked widespread havoc for a year or more without ground gunfire. The area affected by the EMP would live the “stone age” as anything that works with electricity would be useless unless they are EMP proof.

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Quote:China’s EMP Strike Capabilities 

An American expert on EMP warfare, the late Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, [url=https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1102202.pdf]published a report in July 2020, during his tenure as the Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, in which he stated that China has long known about nuclear high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP).

It has defensive and offensive programs that are almost certainly more robust than any in the United States.

According to Dr. Pry, references to potential HEMP attacks against the US figure prominently in Chinese military writings as a means of prevailing in war. He explained that China’s military doctrine closely associates cyber-attacks with HEMP attacks as part of what it refers to as ‘Total Information Warfare.’

In this concept of Total Information Warfare, China regards cyber bugs and hacking as functional equivalents of scouts who conduct surveillance and make secret preparations for large-scale military offensives.

Therefore, China’s cyber-attacks, such as the one in June 2015 on computers in virtually every federal agency, stealing sensitive information on millions of federal employees, should be considered a possible practice for Total Information Warfare, including HEMP attacks, according to Dr. Pry.

File Image: Electromagnetic Pulse Attack

In August 2021, a Chinese defense contractor conducted an experiment in which a powerful electromagnetic pulse brought down an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying 1,500 meters above sea level. This was possibly China’s first openly reported field test of an EMP weapon, according to Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Besides that, scientists at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) have been working on a hypersonic missile with a non-nuclear EMP warhead capable of disrupting the adversary’s electrical grids and power supply.

This missile could reportedly cruise at six times the speed of sound and cover around 3,000 kilometers in 25 minutes.

Artist’s impression of a hypersonic missile.

Chinese military experts have repeatedly made references to potential EMP attacks on American aircraft carriers, in which a missile armed with an EMP warhead could be detonated within dozens of kilometers around the aircraft carrier to unleash a strong electromagnetic pulse that can paralyze the radar and telecommunications system of the aircraft carrier and vessels around it.

If this happens, the air defense missile systems of the aircraft carrier will not function without the functioning control radars, enabling the Chinese military forces to destroy an aircraft carrier and escort warships quickly.

According to Christian D. Orr, former US President Trump’s administration has been the only one in American history to take the threat of a deliberate EMP attack seriously. Trump issued an Executive Order in March 2019, which directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop quadrennial risk assessments of EMP.

While the Biden administration has continued this Executive Order but suspended the one aimed at securing the US’ bulk power system, and because of this, the US continues to import Extra High Voltage (EHV) Transformers from China, making the US potentially more susceptible to EMP and cyber-attacks, Orr wrote citing remarks from late Dr. Pry.

Dr. Pry also noted that the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Bill had allocated millions of dollars for additional studies on protecting electric grids and other critical infrastructure from EMP. However, no measures have been taken to bolster any vital infrastructures.

China has been investing in protecting its military forces and critical infrastructures from HEMP and other effects of nuclear weapons since the Cold War era.

Quote:There are many advantages to a balloon launch for the attacker.   One is the great difficulty in detecting the launch as compared to a missile.   This is especially true if the balloon were launched at night (which is the only time that such an attack launch would make sense).   A balloon could easily reach its maximum altitude, and detonate before sunrise.   Nations without highly developed nuclear weapons programs can find that there is great difficulty in mating a nuclear weapon to a rocket.   There are no such problems dangling the weapon from a balloon.   The importance of miniaturization and reduced weight are much less important for a balloon-launched weapon.
The damage that could be done by a balloon-launched weapon would be quite considerable.   For example, a balloon launched off the coast of New Jersey in the right wind conditions could gain sufficient altitude to put a very damaging EMP over an area extending from south of Washington, D.C. to north of New York City.   The number of financial and critical data processing centers in this area would insure the worst national catastrophe since the U.S. Civil War.   In addition, many critical power grid transformers are in this region, and would be likely to be damaged beyond repair due to the geomagnetically-induced currents resulting from the explosion.   If the weapon were thermonuclear, the destruction of the power grid would be much worse.
As I have stated elsewhere, it is a common and completely untrue fallacy that going from a simple fission weapon to a thermonuclear weapon is exceedingly difficult and expensive.   New car companies do not begin by building Stanley Steamers and or the Ford Model-T.   New radio companies do not spend decades with ancient vacuum tube radio designs before putting solid-state radios on the market.   Just because the United States and the old Soviet Union had lots of difficulty in moving from simple fission weapons to much more powerful thermonuclear weapons, it doesn't mean that any other nation would have similar difficulties.   When the United States and the Soviet Union discovered the currently-used dry-fuel two-stage thermonuclear weapons, the first test in each case was so much more powerful than expected that each of those first tests actually resulted in human fatalities.

Quote:By now you've heard all about the balloon that the Communist Chinese sent flying over the continental (Dis)United (Soviet Socialist and Utterly Woke) States last week, and all the attendant hoopla that accompanied it. Secretary of State Blinken Planken Plunken summed up the snit that the affair caused the Bai-Den Jo misadministration by huffing and puffing and blowing down the upcoming summit. Faux news, SeeBS, and other lamestream propotainment media outlets were outraged that the balloon had not been detected long before, and shot down before it was able to enter the airspace of the continental USSUWSA. The price of circus peanuts surged on the commodities markets.

The pace of discussion and theories quickly became more and more serious, as some experts weighed in to disclose that the USSUWSA - which has the world's largest nuclear arsenal in the hands of a banana republic - had not detected the balloon until someone actually saw it; other experts disputed this, producing articles that indicated the Chinese had been sending balloons over the country for a long time, and that the Bai-Den Jo misadministration had known about it all along, but just hadn't found the time to inform anyone about it, busy as they were stashing classified documents in various family bolt holes around the country  and laundering financial gifts from the very same Chinese  (the theory that the Chinese were using balloons to drop cash payments in brown manila security envelopes to the Bai-Dens has no evidence to back it up). Other experts wondered how the USSUWSA could put a man on the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and not shoot down a balloon, while still other experts said that this was precisely the point, and that if the USSUWSA could not shoot down a mere balloon in 2023, how could it have put a man on the Moon in 1969, etc etc.

Much of the discussion turned on what the purpose of sending balloons to this country could be. And much of this discussion mentioned, by way of an historical footnote, that the Japanese had sent balloons to this country at the end of World War Two, that were carrying bombs. The idea was to rain destruction down on the country from the relatively radar-undetectable balloons. As it turned out, they caused only one casualty, and not nearly as much of a fracas as the Chinese balloon, which caused no casualties but did cause a week-long hysteria-fest.

The theories sprouted and bred like rabbits, multiplying exponentially for every one hundred miles it travelled. The consensus appeared to be that the Chinese were spying and gathering information on our nuclear missile sites, and that the balloon was steerable and, like its Japanese forebears from World War Two, difficult to detect. By this time, of course, the Chinese Communist Party had weighed in with an explanation, putting the world on notice that its feathers were officially ruffled, that the balloon was a civilian project, and how dare the USSUWSA shoot it down? The official quickly moved on to the auction of a bridge in Brooklyn.  One theory was that the Chinese were gathering data and intelligence on communications and social networks and so on.

Another theory that someone sent me, and my personal favorite  - even as the circus peanut features market plummeted after it was shot down, prompting some to call for more Wall Street bailouts - was the theory that this balloon was a test run for balloons designed to carry small nuclear weapons, and that blowing one up at 65,000 feet over the USSUWSA was the ultimate object of the exercise, that would send an EMP to wipe out all that wonderful, new, and utterly worthless central bank digital currency. The Chinese, in short, were sending a clear and unmistakable message.

Every now and then a relatively more rational voice could be heard, emphasizing that the Chinese had more reliable platforms for gathering air-borne intelligence on the USSUWSA's nuclear missile sites, things like ... oh, I don't know... spy satellites that could take pictures from space and monitor communications, plus a vast network of Chinese restaurants scattered around the country which could support networks of spies and so on and so forth. Fortune cookies could be used to transmit messages via the good old fashioned tactic of a dead drop, and incriminating messages could be disposed of by simply eating them. No balloons needed.

***
If by now you've gathered that I'm a bit skeptical of all the hysteria that accompanied the balloon, you'd be right (and please note, I'm as skeptical of the CCP's ruffled feathers as I am of all the "explanations" and indignation coming from the USSUWSA).

So just what is going on?
Well, I strongly suspect a hint is supplied by this short article, shared by W.G.:

Waltz: Chinese Spy Balloon ‘a Sputnik Moment’

(And thanks to Zero Hedge for this article that appeared after I completed this blog, courtesy of V.T.: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chinese-spy-balloon-story-manufactured-crisis-alternative-reading )

The article, and representative Waltz, are correct, the extent of Chinese spying, and more importantly, "institution-influencing and co-option" is massive. But given its extent, why all the hoopla over a mere balloon? And why now?

I suspect there are two reasons, and the second of these is by far the most important to the desperate deep state. The first reason, though, is the Bai-Den misadministration is in massive trouble, and desperately needs to refocus attention away from its own gaffes.  But the second of these reasons is, I strongly suspect, the basic reason: the Ukraine narrative is falling apart almost as fast as the Ukraine itself is. Nothing has come from the USSUWSA's meddling other than human suffering and loss, and another war that it cannot win, especially with shipments of numbers of tanks that come nowhere near the numbers needed to stop the Russians. The venture is not a war that the West can win - conventionally or otherwise -  nor is it a war that is popular with the USSUWSA's dwindling allies. It is a war that, the longer it is prolonged, the more maneuvering room it gives to China.  (And stop and consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that the West cannot mount the major industrial-scale warfare that it once mounted during the World Wars... its manufacturing base is no longer there to enable it do do so. Consider also the fact that Russia is able to do so...)

In short, I suspect, and suspect quite strongly, that the balloon story is exactly that: another typical example of a dwindling bag of tricks, in this case, a trick designed to allow the USSUWSA to "pivot to China" as the "enemy de jour" .... the Ukraine and Russia did not work.  It  is a way of extricating the West from the mess it created in the Ukraine, and to pivot to the next big area,,,

... where it will undoubtedly make yet another colossal mess.  The words of the old Tom Lehrer satirical song The MLF Lullaby come to mind: "...let's make peace the way we did in Stanleyville and Saigon."

See you on the flip side....

Giza Death Star

Quote:A Brief History of Project Moby Dick, the Cold War’s Least Believable Surveillance Strategy

The U.S. once launched hundreds of balloons in an attempt to spy on the Soviets.



On January 13, 1956, a specially modified Air Force C-119 roared over the Sea of Japan in pursuit of a high priority target. The plane, callsign “Center 39,” suddenly made visual contact with what looked like a huge, translucent teardrop floating 50,000 feet in the air.

The crew quickly typed out a “cut down code” and watched a box drop from the bottom of the teardrop before deploying a set of parachutes. After a painfully tense series of unsuccessful passes, the crew finally succeeded, at 9,000 feet, with the difficult task of snatching the object with a grappling hook extended out of the rear of the aircraft.

This daring aeronautical maneuver was a part of one of the Cold War’s most incredible intelligence gathering stunts. In an effort to gather information from behind the Iron Curtain, the U.S. Air Force launched hundreds of spy balloons to float over the Soviet Union, collect photographic coverage, and hopefully reappear in friendly airspace for midair recovery.

In the days before reconnaissance satellites, balloons were seen as a safer alternative to proposals for manned overflights, and less provocative than plans to attach cameras to cruise missiles. But the audacity of the balloon program also reflected the tremendous appetite for recon information in Washington. In his 1991 history of the Moby Dick program, as it was known, Curtis Peebles describes how “the reconnaissance balloon had the highest national priority of 1-A. The only other project to share this priority was the hydrogen bomb. Knowledge is power.”
...



Still, even the most optimistic assessments admitted that there was a possibility that some of the balloons would veer wildly off course. To aid in recovery, a cartoon and multilingual placard was included, encouraging them to be brought to U.S.-allied bases for a reward. 

“THIS BOX CAME FROM THE SKY
IT IS HARMLESS
IT HAS WEATHER DATA IN IT
NOTIFY THE AUTHORITIES
YOU WILL RECEIVE A REWARD IF YOU
TURN IT IN AS IT IS”

The program officially commenced on January 10, 1956, with eight launches from Incirlik, Turkey, and one from Giebelstadt, West Germany. Wave after wave followed over the coming weeks, quickly racking up some 448 successful launches.

Quote:A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.

The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.

But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.

There are suspicions among other prominent members of the small, pico-ballooning enthusiasts’ community, which combines ham radio and high-altitude ballooning into a single, relatively affordable hobby.


“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.

The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.

“I’m guessing probably they were pico balloons,” said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Merlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Aviation Week contacted a host of government agencies, including the FBI, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Security Council (NSC) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for comment about the possibility of pico balloons. The NSC did not respond to repeated requests. The FBI and OSD did not acknowledge that harmless pico balloons are being considered as possible identities for the mystery objects shot down by the Air Force.

“I have no update for you from NORAD on these objects,” a NORAD spokesman says. 

On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects “could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons. 

...
The community is also nervous that their balloons could be shot down next. Medlin says one of his balloons—call sign W5KUB-112—is projected by HYSPLIT to enter U.S. airspace on Feb. 17. It already circumnavigated the globe several times, but its trajectory last carried the object over China before it will enter either Mexican or U.S. airspace.

“I hope,” Medlin said, “that in the next few days when that happens we’re not real trigger-happy and start shooting down everything.”

Quote:"Anything's Possible!"

The Echo balloon was perhaps the most beautiful object ever to be put into space. The big and brilliant sphere had a 31,416-square-foot surface of Mylar plastic covered smoothly with a mere 4 pounds of vapor-deposited aluminum. All told, counting 30 pounds of inflating chemicals and two 11-ounce, 3/8-inch-thick radio-tracking beacons (packed with 70 solar cells and 5 storage batteries), the sphere weighed only 132 pounds.

For those enamored with its aesthetics, folding the beautiful balloon into its small container for packing into the nose cone of a Thor-Delta rocket was somewhat like folding a large Rembrandt canvas into a tiny square and taking it home from an art sale in one's wallet. However, the folding of the balloon posed more than aesthetic problems. The structure not only had to fit inside the spherical canister but also had to unfold properly for inflation.

The technique for folding the 100-foot inflatable balloons evolved from a classic "Eureka" moment. One morning in 1960, Ed Kilgore, the man in the Engineering Service Division responsible for the Shotput test setups, received a call from Schjeldahl, the manufacturer of the Echo balloons. The company's technicians were having a terrible time: not only were they unable to fit the balloon into its canister, they couldn't even squeeze it into a small room.

Kilgore mulled over the problem all day and part of the night, but it wasn't until the next morning that he happened upon a possible solution.

"It was raining," he recalls, "and as I started to leave for work, my wife Ann arrived at the door to go out as I did. She had her plastic rain hat in her hand. It was folded in a long narrow strip and unfolded to a perfect hemisphere to fit the head." Recognizing the importance of his accidental discovery, Kilgore told his wife that she "would have to use an umbrella or get wet because I needed that rain hat."

At Langley, Kilgore gave the hat to Austin McHatton, a talented technician in the East Model Shop, who had full-size models of its fold patterns constructed. Kilgore remembers that a "remarkable improvement in folding resulted." The Project Echo Task Group got workmen to construct a makeshift "clean" room from two-by-four wood frames covered
with plastic sheeting. In this room, which was 150 feet long and located in the large airplane hangar in the West Area, a small group of Langley technicians practiced folding the balloons for hundreds of hours until they discovered just the right sequence of steps by which to neatly fold and pack the balloon. For the big Echo balloons, this method was proof-tested in the Langley 60-foot vacuum tank as well as in the Shotput flights.

Whether the packed balloon would have deployed properly on 13 May 1961, no one will ever know because once again the launch vehicle failed. The second stage of the Delta refused to fire, and the whole rocket dropped into
the Atlantic. The vehicle's manufacturer, Douglas, blamed a malfunctioning accelerometer.

By this point, the program had experienced a total of seven failures including those of the two small pre-Echo test satelloons. For a test conducted on 31 May, the team returned to using the Shotput launcher. With tracking beacons aboard, the balloon deployed successfully, which helped the NASA engineers rally from their recent setback.

Still, critics continued to doubt the overall Echo concept. Some swore that even if the satelloon ever got up into space and inflated properly, micrometeorites would puncture its skin, thus destroying the balloon within hours. Not so, the Langley engineers countered. The idea was to pressurize the balloon just enough to overstress the material slightly, thus causing it to take on a permanent set. Even after its internal pressure had dwindled to nothing, the balloon would retain its shape. Because the outer skin was not extremely rigid-it was in engineering slang "dead-soft" -it could be punctured by a small meteorite and still not shatter. Finally, a study by Bressette showed that micrometeorites would erode less than one-millionth of the surface area a day. If only a launching and deployment would go right, the satelloon's sublimating solid-pressurization system would work lonS enough to enable engineers to conduct their communications experiment.

The next time around, the launch finally did go right. At 5:39 a.m. on 12 August 1960, Thor-Delta No. 2 blasted into the sky from launchpad 17 at Cape Canaveral, taking its balloon into orbit. A few minutes later, the balloon inflated perfectly. At 7:41 a.m., still on its first orbit, Echo 1 relayed its first message, reflecting a radio signal shot aloft from California to Bell Labs in New Jersey. "This is President Eisenhower speaking," the voice from space said. "This is one more significant step in the United States' program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes. The satellite balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interest." After the presidential message, NASA used the balloon to transmit two-way telephone conversations between the east and west coasts. Then a signal was transmitted from the United States to France and another was sent in the opposite direction. During the first two weeks, the strength of the signal bounced off Echo 1 remained within one decibel of Langley's theoretical calculations.

The newspapers sounded the trumpets of success: "U.S. Takes Big Jump in Space Race"; "U.S. Orbits World's First Communications Satellite: Could Lead to New Marvels of Radio and TV Projection"; "Bright Satellite Shines Tonight." So eager was the American public to get a glimpse of the balloon that NASA released daily schedules telling when and where the sphere could be seen overhead.

For the engineers from Langley who were lucky enough to be at Cape Canaveral for the launch, this was a heady time. Norm Crabill remembers hearing the report that "Australia's got the beacon," meaning that the tracking station on that far-off continent had picked up the satellite's beacon signal. To this day, Crabill "gets goose bumps just thinking about that moment." He remembers thinking, "Anything's possible!" 73 After all, the space age had arrived, and in a sense, anything was.

Reflections

Out of the seven failures, including the scintillating bits of Shotput 1, NASA built a successful communications satellite program, which entranced the public. After a fully operational Echo balloon was launched into orbit on 12 August 1960, the big silver satelloon continued to orbit for eight years, not falling back to earth until May 1968. For that entire period, the satelloon served as a significant propaganda weapon for the United States. It was a popular symbol of the peaceful and practical uses of space research, especially in the early 1960s when the country still seemed so far behind the Soviets.

During its long sojourn in space, Echo 1 proved to be an exceptionally useful tool. First and foremost, by enabling numerous radio transmissions to be made between distant ground stations, it demonstrated the feasibility of a global communications system based on satellites. The rapid and successful development of worldwide communications in the 1960s depended upon this demonstration. Echo 1 also proved wrong the experts who said that the satelloon, after losing internal pressure because of meteoroid punctures, would collapse from external pressure. Echo actually retained its sphericity far longer than expected, the external pressures (including solar radiation) doing more to change the orbit of the satelloon than to collapse it.

The demise of the passive satellite communication system and the emergence of the active ·communication system, however, also need to be explained in the context of broader economic, political, and institutional realities. In the beginning, satellite communications research was funded by the U.S. government because the military required worldwide instantaneous communications for national defense. The military was interested in the passive system because it could not be electronically jammed. On the other hand, the private telecommunications companies were not yet interested in a satellite communications system, partly because they were investing heavily in ground relay stations and under-the-ocean cable systems and partly because their engineers strongly suspected that radio signals passing through the earth's ionosphere would be seriously weakened in intensity.

In an ironic twist of fate, given the history that was to follow, the Echo balloon actually changed this thinking about the potential of a communications system in space. When Echo 1 demonstrated that the ionosphere was not going to be a problem in satellite communications, the private sector jumped on the bandwagon and demanded their own geosynchronous satellite system, but the private sector wanted an active rather than a passive system.

Many of the companies involved had the technical knowledge to develop an active system, but this was not the sole reason for their interest; money was another factor. Individual companies could charge for sending a message through the system since they would own the frequency channels located in the particular satellites. As Bressette comments, "The active communications people used the capitalistic approach for the success of a project: 'Does it make money?' On the other hand, the few people [like Bressette] who were promoting the passive system were thinking more democratically.

Just think how inexpensive satellite communications would be today, if it were possible to replace all the active communications satellites with just three nonmaintenance passive satellites."