[ExI] balloon spotting

[spike at rainier66.com]

That Chinese balloon in the news gave me in idea.  

 

I can imagine something like that being made of radar absorbing material,
since there isn't a lot of structural strength required, but there isn't any
visible light absorbing material.  There has been debate over whether China
may have sent balloons over the continental US before (making it sound like
they might have gone undetected.)  

 

Many of us have telescopes which would be able to easily detect something of
this size: 30 meters diameter flying at 20 km.  OK that's about 1.5
milliradians.  With a moderately low magnification, we could set up a
low-cost sky-sweeping digital imager, which we could rig up to send signals
to an Arduino with image recognition software.  We could get an amateur
balloon-spotting club going, catch the sneaky commies in case the military
radar misses it.

 

Do we have EMP hipsters among us?  Would a structure like the Chinese hauled
up there be used for EMP-ing the US?  If China grabs Taiwan and
simultaneously EMPs the electronics, then the USA would have waaaay bigger
problems on our hands than whatever is going on in Taiwan.  Specifically:
the USA would need to somehow replace millions of computers while China
would hold most of the capacity to manufacture high end computer chips.
This would be bad.

 

spike 

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