A large military airship has been found by satellites at a remote base in the desert of northwest China. With an airship, easily manoeuvrable, the question of the vulnerability of the balloons was resolved which, instead, remain in the air at the mercy of the winds and above all from the interception of the adversaries and the consequent shooting down, as occurred with the Chinese balloons found above United States and Canada last February.
(by Massimiliano D'Elia) The very high altitude is difficult to control and is not regulated like normal air traffic which reaches up to 20 km above the ground. The Chinese balloons discovered in the American skies at the beginning of the year have moved into the gray, ambiguous area, where traditional military aviation, in the absence of a proven threat, cannot intervene.
The very high atmosphere is, for now, only a place of transition for space rockets and ballistic missiles, even if armies see it as an interesting space in which to increase their military potential. As the technology matures, the very high altitude will offer exciting new operational capabilities.
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The new technological means will make high altitude accessible thanks to the high speed that compensates for the low density of the air, or with the design of high-altitude stratospheric balloons. As soon as it is possible to control the trajectory of the balloons so that they do not drift with the wind, then one can speak of a new generation of “satellites”.
A hot air balloon costs less than a traditional satellite and can allow observing a large area of interest, with image sensors or electromagnetic listening. It can also be useful for telecommunications. On the other hand, their interception from the Earth could be complex and expensive. With the aerostats, the latency of the satellites is also eliminated, which does not allow images and videos to be brought back to Earth in real time and for a long time.
Recently, military and intelligence agencies have deployed balloons to carry modern sensor technology for communications and surveillance for longer periods than airplanes. In addition, modern balloons can hover over an area much longer than a passing satellite.
Frank Montoya, a former FBI official said that balloon surveillance can be thought of as something like an unmanned U-2 spy plane in that both offer a new strategic perspective and are cheaper and easier to deploy than to satellites. High-flying photos can provide details of military bases, dams, power plants, fiber optic network infrastructure, server farm locations, bridges, rail lines, interstate highways, providing an adversary with specific data on how, for example, to disrupt the internet, slow down military deployments, or devastate the power grid, Montoya said.
CNN yesterday revealed the existence of a large military airship spotted for the first time at a remote base in the desert of northwest China. With an airship, easily manoeuvrable, the question of the vulnerability of the balloons was resolved which, instead, remain in the air at the mercy of the winds and above all from the interception of the adversaries and the consequent shooting down, as occurred with the Chinese balloons found above United States and Canada.
The images held by CNN were taken in November 2022 by the US satellite imagery company blacksky: show a 30-foot-long airship in the center of a mile-long airstrip in a desert military compound.
CNN submitted the images to several aerospace experts, who confirmed that it is an airship and an airstrip, delimited by a pivot point used for launching airships, as well as a huge hangar of almost 274 meters. The executive director of theOklahoma Aerospace Institute, Jamey Jacobs, said that an airship like this could be used as a "submarine in the skies" and that it seems have propulsion and navigation capabilities that would allow it to fly over an area for an extended period.
Thus began a new frontier where the superpowers will have to work hard to dominate this new strategic space at very high altitudes, over 20km from the Earth.