this video is sponsored by you our supporters join us on patreon our Discord however else you want to
get in touch with us but just get in touch with us the shocking news that two balloons from China
were flying over America went viral just a few days ago causing political tensions to rise I'm
sorry about that but this got me wondering why would China use a technology invented over 240
years ago to spy one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world just how advanced
are these balloons was it really a spy balloon or something else I think there's a far more
powerful story to unravel so stick around to the end of this video to learn my take on what this
all means here's a hint I think it has nothing to do with spying on America and everything to
do with something hidden further north I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
okay so let's do a quick rundown of the facts a balloon the size of three school buses originally launched from the mainland
of China entered U.S airspace on January 28th a week later it was shot down off the coast of
South Carolina after traversing the country and passing over several sensitive military sites
a second balloon with a different payload was China confirmed as theirs was also spotted over
South America and there are rumors of a third over Canada and now the Department of Defense
thinks there might be a whole Fleet of them in the sky obviously this put the entire country in
turmoil and fueled a political Firestorm but China said that they're just plain old weather balloons
that drifted off course so to find out the truth I thought I'd dig deeper into high altitude balloons
how they work how capable they are what China's real intentions might be and whether or not you
and I should be worried high altitude balloons like the weather balloons Nasa uses AKA strata
stats are helium or hydrogen-filled balloons that are launched into the stratosphere reaching out
attitudes of 11 to 23 miles above sea level 58 000 to 121 000 feet you think they're made of some
super high-tech lightweight material but most are just made of either good old latex or polyethylene
film the same type of material used for plastic bags this material is only .0008 inches thick
about the same as an ordinary sandwich wrap when launched balloons are filled with hydrogen
or helium both lighter than air which creates a buoyant force that makes the balloon float just
like Mr frederickson's party balloons and up that's his name I had noted that was his name
another who now one thing you'll notice about high altitude balloons is that unlike party
balloons they're never filled all the way to the brim at ground level which is why they look all
shriveled up just before they're released this is because the pressure of the air at sea level is
14 times greater than the pressure at 60 000 feet so it squishes down on the balloon the
gas inside the balloon will naturally expand more than 10 times its volume as it climbs to
the stratosphere to stay in equilibrium with the outside air eventually filling the entire volume
of the balloon the balloon has a lifting Force because though the pressures are equal helium's
density is much lower than airs the reason this matters is that we can get an understanding of
how much payload the Chinese balloon was carrying by looking at the shape and size and knowing how
high it was because the balloon has a very strong spherical shape we can assume that the balloon was
at near maximum volume reports stated that the balloon was roughly 130 feet wide for a volume
of approximately 1 million cubic feet that's the volume of 11 Olympic swimming pool based
on the buoyancy equation and using helium as the lifting gas the balloon must have been carrying a
payload of around 7 000 pounds quick fact for you according to the US regulations weather balloons
aren't allowed to carry more than 12 pounds of total payload weight so why on Earth do you need 7
000 pounds for a weather balloon well the short answer is you don't there's also the question
of the amount of power it was carrying and using pictures show two solar panel arrays
with a total of 16 panels your typical panel will produce 250 watts to 400 watts and weigh 30 to 40
pounds each depending on the size so that means array alone probably weighs somewhere between 480
and 640 pounds and would Peak at around 4 to 6.4 kilowatts of power which is just an insane amount
of power for a weather balloon to be honest it seems excessive even for a spy balloon I mean
a typical surveillance synthetic aperture radar or SAR for Imaging weighs only about 100 pounds
give or take and consumes just 100 to 200 watts of power so what other equipment was this thing
carrying that needed at least 3 800 watts and weighed over 6 000 pounds it's an interesting
question to say the very least so head down to the comments section let me know what you think
what was this thing actually doing I'll tell you what I think in a little bit it's clear that this
is much more more than just a weather balloon in fact the modern stratostat is a surprisingly
capable platform that is used for dozens of applications and here we were just thinking
these were glorified party balloons balloons have been around for about 240 years and while there
have been some improvements material since 1896 not much has changed in the basic concept besides
their size that is these balloons are massive as we saw they can take up the volume of 11 Olympic
swimming pools and much more some grow to as much as 40 million cubic feet and have the surface area
of over 22 Acres they can also reach staggering Heights in 2002 an unmanned balloon called bu60-1
broke the altitude record reaching 32.1 miles 173 900 feet above sea level and 14 years later Allen
used to shattered the previous record for a manned stratostat by sending to an astounding 135 890
feet above sea level then there's maneuverability modern balloons don't just go with the wind
they're actually maneuverable some have thrusters and Rudders so that makes sense right but others
like the Chinese balloons are simply floating balls that according to the dod can be steered
without the Rudders and pedals you might be wondering how that's possible while they do
this by using different ballast systems to climb and dive to different altitudes and take advantage
of different wind currents traveling in different directions some of these ballasts condense water
from the air to get heavier and others suck up air into the internal bag but the idea is
the same an American company called Aerostar specializes in building autonomous terrible
high altitude balloons and can deploy them with pinpoint accuracy over a desired area the Chinese
balloon is likely using a similar system but it's in the payload capacity and all the add-ons that
things take a different turn modern balloons can carry thousands of pounds of payload so they can
pack up all kinds of gear both for science and research or Warfare but this doesn't address a
key question most of us had when we first heard about this by balloon why would the Chinese use
balloons to begin with aren't spy planes and spy satellites better contrary to satellites which
just Zip by and are very predictable balloons like the Aerostar Thunderhead system can loiter over a
designated area almost indefinitely Gathering much better images and intelligence data than editing
satellite or spy plane ever could balloons are also almost undetectable by radar and
they don't have a significant heat signature and almost impossible to see at night and are very
hard to spot even during the day because they fly in the stratosphere rather than the lower
Earth orbit balloons can take better images of the ground and they can detect low power radio
frequencies that could help them understand how different us weapon systems communicate this is
invaluable intelligence data satellites can't pick up balloons are also Dirt Cheap compared
to satellites and spy planes they can be deployed much faster too but above all one feature that
I like to point out is just how hard they are to take down in 1998 a pair of Canadian cf-18 fighter
jets hit a rogue weather balloon with thousands of rounds near Newfoundland and it just kept going
this is because a stratostat isn't like a party balloon that'll just pop the minute you poke it
with a pin those pop because the helium pressure inside is way greater than the outside air and the
balloon is in tension and releases that pressure when popped weather balloons on the other hand are
at the same pressure as the outside air so if you poke a hole in them it'll be like opening a small
window in a closed Hangar and waiting for all the air to escape combine that with the altitude they
can reach Which is far above any jet could and the humble old balloon is turning out to be a
surprisingly formidable weapon truth is we only managed to take this one down because it was at
around 60 000 feet well within the operating range of our f-22s but if it was at 120 000
feet for example the F-22 might not be able to get high enough and and shoot a missile high enough to
reach it so we're gonna have to come up with new ideas of how to handle this sort of threat ideas
anyone shout them out in the comments below now let's talk about cost because that's when
this entire incident really gets interesting as I said before standard balloons are made basically
of plastic bags so the balloon itself is dirt cheap most of the cost is in the payload itself
and that can vary wildly for the sake of argument let's use Google's loom project as a reference
Loom was a series of scientific balloons that were poised to beam high-speed internet to rural areas
each of their balloons cost around twenty five thousand dollars in 2023 money so we'll Factor
the manufacturing cost of Chinese balloon at a conservative hundred thousand dollars you
want a hazard to guess how much the U.S spent to take that hundred thousand dollar balloon out of
the sky the balloon was shot down by an F-22 Raptor scrambled from Langley Air Force Base
in Virginia making this the first ever reported air-to-air kill of the Raptor fighter jet since
its introduction in 2005. he used the call sign Frank as a nod to Frank Luke Jr the World War
One fighter Ace who was credited with shooting down 14 German surveillance balloons you gotta
love military history now the f-20 Raptor costs 85 000 per flight hour to operate the flight
from Langley to the South North Carolina border along the Atlantic is a short one at only around
one hour but factoring pre and post flight and possible loitering as a balloon cleared land
we're looking at around four hours so that's three hundred and forty thousand dollars oh then there's
the aim9 Sidewinder infrared heat-seeking missile to shoot the balloon out of the sky at a cost of
381 thousand dollars this is interesting because even though the balloon didn't have a noticeable
Heat Signature the missiles Advanced IR tracking of the missile could still distinct English to
balloon's IR signature from the surrounding Sky pretty cool stuff add in the accompanying host
of two F-15 fighter aircraft four kc-46 Pegasus tanker aircraft and we're at a very conservative
1.2 million dollars not factoring the salaries of the Pentagon officials Admirals and Air Force
personnel but it gets even worse the FAA also issued a ground stop advisory for the Charleston
South Carolina Myrtle Beach South Carolina and Wilmington North Carolina airports from 12 45 to
245 Pacific Standard Time on February 4th a very basic estimation of passengers affected based on
Airport annual rates and a ticket price of just two dollars puts lost Revenue at four hundred and
ten thousand dollars and then on a Saturday at noon it could have usually been double that the
military also stated that they have been blocking the balloon's ability to send and receive data
since it entered U.S airspace that's pretty cool and apparently they did it using a Boeing rc-135
that consumes 2200 gallons of jet fuel per hour at 3.86 per gallon that's almost four hundred
thousand dollars in fuel alone so in the best of cases it cost the US around 2 million dollars to
shoot down a 100 000 surveillance balloon and what's to say there couldn't be others but at
least the long beleaguered grossly expensive F-22 Raptor a super fighter jet design take on
Next Generation Russian Jets finally got its first aerial kill against a balloon most of the outrage
at this story stems from the U.S not shooting it out of the sky the minute they spotted it in Idaho
or Montana President Joe Biden stated upon the balloon successful shootdown that he wanted to
shoot it down earlier but was advised to wait until a cleared American soil I'm not trying
to get political here so you'll have to decide on your own of the strategy of it all but regardless
I don't think that this whole thing is about spying on the U.S assets or testing out their
defense systems at all but first a disclaimer everything I've covered so far is based on what we
know the following is just a wild theory for the Chinese government's true motivations so take all
this with a grain of salt I do believe that the Chinese government was telling the truth when they
said that the weather balloon blew off course due to unforeseen weather conditions as you mentioned
before these kinds of balloons could potentially be susceptible to them but I also think there's a
whole lot more to the story personally I think the Chinese have been charting and monitoring
the Arctic I know this may sound crazy at first but hear me out unlike Antarctica which has a
land mass the Arctic is just a floating shelf of ice one that is thawing at an alarming rate
and while most climatologists see this as Doom and Gloom it might just be the latest Frontier
for opportunistic Nations around the world one study by the U.S Geological Survey states that
30 percent of the world's undiscovered gas and 13 of the Undiscovered oil lies north of the Arctic
Circle most of this was inaccessible before but not anymore as the ice keeps melting away also
there's a whole new push for new shipping routes across the Arctic and while China doesn't have
any claims to this land they do have some Ambitions while countries like the US and
Russia have sovereignty 200 miles off their Coast that extends into the Arctic the region Beyond is
considered a common Heritage For All Mankind meaning it's not really accessible or owned by
anyone but Rush has been investing heavily into a new oil and gas project called vostok oil in The
Great Arctic nature reserve one of their biggest investors China there are Technologies developed
by the Royal Dutch Shell corporation that could detect the tracest presence of hydrocarbons in
ground soil from aircraft like a balloon so it's possible that the Chinese are using this
technology for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic reports have suggested that three Chinese
spy balloons were detected during President Trump's Administration and won before during
President Biden's these are just the ones that we know about how many could have actually reached
their destination has China been collecting data using balloons over the Arctic for years honestly
who knows I have an entire episode planned on a future race for the Arctic that you don't want
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a part of the community thank you so much for watching I'm Ricky this has been Tupa DaVinci