More like a week late. Our military/NORAD had be tracking the balloon since it was over the Pacific Ocean. There was ample time to safely shoot it down prior to collecting any intelligence. Biden and the military are both pushing the excuse that they waited until it was safe. A lot of Americas are naive or just plain ignorant and will just take the government’s and leftist media’s excuses. The balloon traveled over AK and multiple states that vast open spaces where it could have been taken down prior to collecting any intelligence. I am very certain that the intelligence was collected and relayed to CCP satellites. It is not likely that the Chinese had any intention to recover the balloon. In fact, just using my simple and unsophisticated mind, if I were the Chinese, I would make sure any instrument and data in the balloon payload would self destruct prior to our recovery of the balloon. We are not going to have any definitive idea what specific intelligence the Chinese gathered by examining the balloon payload wreckage.
It is clear to me that there is enough money that has passed to the Biden Crime Family and the Penn Biden Center from China that Joe Biden has been compromised. He is owned by the Chinese and is giving hideously unbelievable excuses for his allowing the Chinese to spy on us. Biden needs to be impeached, removed from office and then have criminal espionage charges brought against him.
Just as worrisome is the lack of response and excuses coming from the military. The Joint Chiefs and a lot of woke Pentagon paper pushers need to be retired. They failed in their duty to protect America. Their woke asses need to be fired.
If the Chinese are even slightly good, they probably beamed any data UP to a satellite. That’s almost impossible to tap. And, of course, there is no real need for payload recovery, I’d be surprised if they had 500K in that thing anyway.
People are calling this a Sputnik moment. In some ways it is, because we could have put up a satellite years before Sputnik but there were political pressures that delayed it. Sound familiar?
Russia putting up a satellite was a real breakthrough of imagination. This balloon was 1940’s tech with maybe a little 21’st century tech mixed in. I don’t think we have anything that can actually _capture_ an object floating between 50 an 120K feet, after spending trillions on national defense and having 50+ years to contemplate the problem.