Wafting across the United States and into the attention of an alarmed national and global public, a giant Chinese balloon has changed Americans' awareness of all the stuff floating in the air, and how defence officials watch for it and respond.
President Joe Biden said Thursday (local time) that the US is updating its guidelines for monitoring and reacting to unknown aerial objects.
It comes after the discovery of a suspected Chinese spy balloon transiting the country triggered high-stakes drama, including the US shootdowns of that balloon, and three smaller ones days later.
Biden said officials suspect the three subsequent balloons were ordinary ones. That could mean ones used for research, weather, recreational or commercial purposes.
Officials have been unable to recover any of the remains of those three balloons, and late Friday the US military announced it had ended the search for the objects that were shot down near Deadhorse, Alaska, and over Lake Huron on February 10 and 12.
The episodes opened the eyes of the public to the fact that China is operating a military-linked aerial surveillance program that has targeted over 40 countries, according to the Biden administration. China denies it.
But there's a whole lot of other junk floating up there, too.
And when it comes to peacetime uses, the cheapness of balloons makes them a favourite aerial platform for all kinds of uses, serious and idle.
That includes everything down to "college fraternities with nothing better to do and $10,000," joked Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Himes' role on the committee involved him in a congressionally mandated intelligence and military review of the most credible of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFOs. That review also drove home to him and other lawmakers "how much stuff there is floating around, in particular balloons," Himes said.
For the National Weather Service, balloons are the main means of above-ground forecasting. Forecasters launch balloons twice daily from nearly 900 locations around the world, including nearly 100 in the United States.
High-altitude balloons also help scientists peer out into space from near the edges of the Earth's atmosphere. NASA runs a national balloon program office, helping coordinate launches from east Texas and other sites for universities, foreign groups and other research programs. School science classes launch balloons, wildlife watchers launch balloons.
Commercial interests also send balloons up — such as Google's effort to provide internet service via giant balloons.
And $12 gets hobby balloonists — who use balloons for ham radio or just for the pleasure of launching and tracking them — balloons capable of reaching up to 40,000 feet and higher.
That's roughly around the altitude that the US military says the three smaller balloons were at when US missiles ended their flights.
Among hobby balloonists, there are suspicions that a balloon declared missing by the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Brigade was one of the ones shot down, as the publication Aviation Week Network first reported.
Last year, in the first congressional hearing on unidentified airborne objects in a half-century, Scott Bray, the deputy director of Naval intelligence, told lawmakers that improved sensors, an increase in drones and other non-military unmanned aerial systems, and "aerial clutter", including random balloons, were leading to people noticing more unidentified airborne objects.
That awareness kicked into overdrive this month, after the US military and then the US public spotted the Chinese balloon floating down from the High North.
While the US says previous Chinese balloons have entered US territory, this was the first one of them to slowly cross the United States in plain view of the public.
That balloon, and what had been growing official awareness of a Chinese military-linked balloon surveillance campaign that had targeted dozens of countries, led US officials to change radar and other sensor settings, screening more closely for slow-moving objects in the air as well as fast ones.
Post big Chinese balloon, US defence officials are expected to keep up broader monitoring so that balloons remain on the radar, but fine-tune the response.
Biden's order to the Air Force to shoot down the three smaller airborne objects with Sidewinder missiles left him fending off Republican accusations he was too trigger-happy.
Biden says all four shootdowns were warranted since the balloons could have posed dangers to civilian aircraft. Hobby balloons with payloads of only a few pounds are not covered by many FAA airspace rules.
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