The incident today, though, come
as the Chinese try to beat the US
in a new battlefield called Near Space.
That is the area
within 60 miles
above the Earth's surface.
And China wants to nominate it.
And as we've seen from the spy b
maybe they are.
Will Ripley is OUTFRONT
China's new superpower battlefie
12 to 60 miles above the earth.
Too low for satellites,
too high for most jets.
The stratosphere
Or as China calls it, near-space
In 2018, the Chinese military's
official newspaper said.
Near-space has become a new batt
in modern warfare.
Helix has landed safely back to
more than a decade ago.
Felix Baumgartner's freefall jum
from near space captivated the w
and may have caught
the attention
of Chinese President Xi Jinping
as early as 2014.
He ordered China's Air Force to
air and space
integration and sharpen
their offensive
and defensive capabilities.
He prioritized
development of hypersonic weapon
solar powered drones and high
altitude balloons
all designed for near-space flig
in the stratosphere. Thin Air
China is not alone.
The U.S.
and others are jumping
into the near space race.
Back in 2012, a CNN camera captu
the view
from 100,000 feet on a high alti
weather balloon.
China's suspected spy balloon,
which the Pentagon claims was ca
high resolution cameras and elec
monitoring equipment,
could have captured
Crystal clear images of highly
sensitive areas
and monitored military communica
In some ways, outperforming
China's advanced spy satellites.
When you have something
that's up at 70,000
a hundred thousand feet,
you can see the horizon over 300
miles away,
which is something
you really can't do from an airc
Now, you can do that from a sate
but satellite is pretty expensiv
to get up there.
It takes a little bit
of planning to launch it.
And then you can't
exactly change what it does or f
once it's there.
Navy divers are combing
the waters off the Carolina coas
so the FBI can piece together
the debris
of what
China calls
a civilian weather balloon fight
Unlike these weather
balloons, launched by hand
from Cape Canaveral, Florida,
the Chinese balloon was massive,
some 200 feet tall with a 90 foo
possibly solar powered payload
the size of three city busses.
A source familiar
with congressional briefings
on the balloon
said some components had English
It's not clear
if they were made in America
or another Western country.
And there is a
growing list
of countries
that are jumping into this
new air space, race
air in China
and the United States,
of course,
also Russia, the United Kingdom,
Japan, Israel, South Korea.
The list goes on.
And this is going to pose
incredibly new challenges
to the security of the United St
and all countries
around the world,
because not only are
these cheaper than satellites
but they're more maneuverable,
easier to operate.
And as we've seen, much harder t
Hmm. It's amazing.
All right. Thank you very much, Will Ripley
And I want to go now
to retired
Air Force Lieutenant General Cha
Tuna Moore.
He was also the former vice dire
for operations for New Arad,
which, of course, was central in
taking down of that
object today, General Moore.
So the Pentagon says that object
about the size of a small car
at 40,000 feet.
They say it was a possible
threat to civilian aircraft.
I understand that
that's smaller than the balloon,
which was three busses.
But to the average person
watching something flying around
that's the size of a small car
is nothing to sneer at.
What do you think it is?
Well, that's a great question.
Erin. At this point, we still do
But I would anticipate
in the coming hours
or days as we recover
the pieces of the wreckage,
we're going to have a really goo
of exactly where it originated.
Who belonged to and what it was
Now, you know,
obviously,
you know so much about this
sort of near-space thing,
maybe the donut hole.
We focus on Earth,
we focus on space in that space
in between.
Certainly China has put a lot of
in there, as we now are very wel
aware of.
Do you think that this object
likely came from China, too?
Well, we simply don't know.
Maybe we'd have to speculate.
I think the key point to remembe
though, based on the reporting
that we just had,
is don't
think about this as single ballo
or single event
We need to think about this
as part of a broader enterprise
that China's
developed from intelligence, sur
and reconnaissance perspective.
They're putting things in space.
They obviously have airborne
aircraft, manned and unmanned.
They could fly off the coast
and stay outside the 12 mile lim
They have cyberspace forces
to conduct those types of missio
And now, of course,
they're exploiting the airspace
and we know the spy
balloons are part of an extensiv
surveillance program, as you poi
Right. So, you know, all these reports
about all these objects of UFOs,
you know, some people were sort of scoffin
when others
said, oh, it's got to be China.
Well, now it appears that plenty of those,
quote unquote, UFOs
were Chinese surveillance equipm
Are you worried at this point?
And you know more than anybody a
what's happening,
you know, given the roles that you've had
and your role in intelligence ig
Are you worried about
how much we don't know about wha
the Chinese are doing
in terms of spying on the US rig
I'm not worried.
We have
the best intelligence organizati
in the world,
and they do a very good job
of keeping us abreast
of what's
going on
and areas like this
so that we can stay ahead of the
I think we just got a little bit
surprised in this particular inc
talking about the spy balloon
that it showed up over the Unite
as quickly as it did.
Yeah. All right.
Well, General Mark,
I appreciate your time. Thank yo