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.
You might be correct. It definitely used to exist. I saw it first hand at Ft. Benning back in the 80’s. It doesn’t take a genius to adapt the solution in this video