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Felaguin t1_j8y41wj wrote

Stupid article title and even the premise seems like bandwagoning to get clicks. While there is no universally-accepted legal definition of where space begins, the spy balloon is nowhere near any of the proposed boundaries.

There is no dispute about being able control our national airspace at 60,000 feet.

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AvcalmQ t1_j8z8edj wrote

18 km out of... 100km. The kármán line isn't even in space, in that you still encounter significant drag and orbit degradation.

Shit man, if 18% is "near" I've got a nearly mint car I can sell.

EDIT: added a word for ease of interpretation

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Science-Compliance t1_j8zr12r wrote

>The kármán line isn't even in space

Earth's exosphere extends out past the moon. Any definition of "space" will be squishy. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience drag, too. Objects at 100km can complete multiple orbits around the Earth before drag pulls them down into the atmosphere. I'd be willing to call that space if someone wanted to argue about it.

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Blank_bill t1_j921s3f wrote

I'm an old coot ,I remember before we had space ( well except for people like Von Braun) but if you can get there in a balloon it's not space.

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Science-Compliance t1_j92w6p4 wrote

What about a balloon with rocket boosters attached to it?

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Blank_bill t1_j92wkg4 wrote

It's the rocets that go not the balloon. I could just see a rocket dragging a balloon behind it.

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AvcalmQ t1_j92uk4o wrote

It's the defined transition, you'd be arguing with the wrong guy on that.

I maybe should've said "up to 100km isn't space" but that's not an argument I thought I'd have had to have, tbh.

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Science-Compliance t1_j92wz94 wrote

The US considers anything past 50 miles in altitude to be space, and, in a manner of definition, they're not necessarily wrong. You can do more than one orbit at this altitude. "Space" is a human construct, so any definition is really going to fit human needs. In any case, 60,000 feet is not "space" by any reasonable definition.

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Aerostudents t1_j8zqriv wrote

>18 km out of... 100km. The kármán line isn't even in space, in that you still encounter drag and orbit degradation.

I mean you still encounter drag and orbit degradation way higher than the karman line though. The ISS also encounters drag and orbit degradation still.

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AvcalmQ t1_j92usue wrote

You're not wrong but you can clearly see what the comment was saying; I can't find many (any) satellites that are continuously operating at or below 100km, whereas I can for those above.

I'll add the word "significant" to further clarify this

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LeviathanGank t1_j8y9jt7 wrote

yes but its provocative, it gets you going.

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OG-Bluntman t1_j91m30w wrote

For perspective, the SR-71 was designed to operate at 80,000ft+. In very simplified terms, “space” starts at about 315,000ft, or about 60 miles.

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Academic_Peanut4232 t1_j90on01 wrote

>There is no dispute about being able control our national airspace at 60,000 feet.

That's not true. It's still face that no one knows what the "UAPs" are/ were. There's stuff flying around that comes from above 80,000 feet into the detection-edge of Earth-based radars and then breaks the laws of physics lol. No one knows what those things are, and no one can "control" our airspace from them. What astounds me is that those things exist, and we're not dumping tons of money trying to figure out what they are and how they fly. Imagine where our space program could be if they made a serious effort at doing that lol.

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Felaguin t1_j90xxte wrote

The fact that 60,000 feet altitude is well within what’s considered national airspace AND that we have a right to control what’s in our airspace is 100% true. It is well-accepted international law — even the Soviet Union (now Russia) accepts it and uses it.

The “detection edge” of Earth-based radars extends well above 100,000 feet, in fact, well above 100 km altitude. See, we have these things called early warning radars that were built decades ago to do precisely this job albeit with objects that move considerably faster than balloons.

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Academic_Peanut4232 t1_j90yxyf wrote

And? I don't see what anything you said has to do with anything I said.

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Felaguin t1_j94nkjw wrote

So we can add English to the list of subjects you don’t understand, including your own fallacious post. Okay.

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Academic_Peanut4232 t1_j94q94v wrote

We couldn't even track balloons until 2 weeks ago. There are/ were balloons flying all around our airspace, and we didn't even know about balloon until a few years ago.

So all the sudden, the things that pilots have been reporting seeing for decades, it makes sense there's no (publicly available) data on that stuff. If we can't even track balloons until recently, how could we track alien spacecraft? Or -- maybe we could/ can, but just like balloons, it was filtered out or some other reason we aren't/ didn't interpret the data correctly?

If something did actually fly into Earth from space, accelerating to ridiculous speeds and breaking the laws of physics -- would that data be looked into, or would it just be ignored as "anomalous" like the balloons were for decades?

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Felaguin t1_j963x1x wrote

You certainly chose a worthy Reddit name. You’re conflating things that are obvious balloons, leaving the discussion of spy versus weather versus hobby aside, with pilot reports of UAPs doing extraordinary things. Some of the pilot reports are easily explained, others (including footage captured by said pilots) are still unexplained.

Your original response to me talked about stuff coming in “from above 80,000 feet into the detection-edge of Earth-based radars”. We use radars to track objects in orbit at altitudes up to 1000 km (over 3 million feet since your inability to reason suggests a further inability to do math).

You further talk wildly about breaking the laws of physics. Nothing the first spy balloon we shot down or any of the other subsequent balloons have done breaks any laws of physics.

Control of national airspace is a point of international law. Whether or not the nation in question can do anything about violations of that airspace is a question of their capability versus the violator’s capability. No one questioned the USSR’s right to shoot down Francis Gary Powers’ U2, they simply weren’t able to do it until his flight. The US “controls” the sealanes within its national waters but drug runners violate that control regularly — it’s still the US’s national right to control those sealanes.

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Abrahamlinkenssphere t1_j8z080d wrote

Also I thought we decided it wasn’t Chinese.

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DrunkSatan t1_j8zbg94 wrote

The balloon that was shot down off the coast of south Carolina is still reported by US intel as Chinese. The three they shot down after were later reported to be private or research and not from China.

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Felaguin t1_j8z7tnj wrote

Since when? News reports indicate it was tracked from the moment it lifted off from China.

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thulesgold t1_j8zebwl wrote

That article and comments like this are obvious attempts at disinformation and sowing doubt.

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