I don’t know why people don’t readily grasp this. The very lowest Earth orbit is it about 525,000 ft above the surface. You take the same cameras and bring them down to 60,000 ft and you have vastly increased image resolution, with no atmospheric distortion.
Furthermore, with a balloon system, instruments that do not presently exist aboard any orbiting satellite can be far more readily deployed. Instruments capable of detecting radiation — Hello, inverse Square law? Sources of radiation that would be entirely below the threshold of detection for orbiting instruments would seem amplified exponentially for the same detector deployed 460,000ft nearer.
More elemental than any of this, though, US airspace should be inviolable. The least threat needs to be met with an iron rebuke, and Biden choked.
Expect more balloons bearing less and less benign payloads.
Will we see proof that the China “weather” balloon had cameras aboard?
Was the $400,000 missile targeted to the balloon, or to the array under the balloon?
A balloon up that high seems like a good place for a Tom Cruise character to latch onto...