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Felaguin t1_j90xxte wrote

Reply to comment by Academic_Peanut4232 in Where does space really begin? Chinese spy balloon highlights legal fuzziness of ‘near space’ by HarpuasGhost

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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