Hong Kong(CNN) In China’s eyes, the newest superpower battlefield lies between 12 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface in a thin airy layer of the atmosphere it calls “near space.”
Lying above the flight paths of most commercial and military jets and below satellites, near-space is a middle ground for spaceflight — but it’s also a domain when where hypersonic weapons and ballistic missiles intersect.
China pays close attention to the developments of the US and other countries in the region, which Chinese military experts hailed as “a new front for militarization” and “an important field of competition among the world’s military powers.”
In addition to developing high-tech vessels such as solar-powered drones and hypersonic vehicles, China is also reviving a decade-old technology to use this area of the atmosphere – lighter-than-air vehicles car. These include stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons — similar to the one spotted over the continental United States and shot down on Saturday.
China maintains that the balloon is a civilian research airship, despite claims by US officials that the device is part of a broad Chinese surveillance program. While the analysis of recovered parts from the downed device has begun, a senior State Department official said Thursday that the balloon “is capable of conducting operations to collect intelligence signals ” and part of a fleet that has flown to “more than 40 countries on five continents. ” — a claim China has rejected.
While questions remain about that incident, a review of Chinese state media reports and scientific papers reveals the country’s growing interest in these lighter-than-air vehicles, which boast of Chinese military experts that can be used in a wide range of purposes, from communication relay, reconnaissance and surveillance to electronic countermeasures.
Ambitions near space
China’s research into high-altitude balloons began in the late 1970s, but in the last decade there has been a renewed focus on using older technology with new hardware as major powers around the world have stepped up the their capabilities in the sky.
“With the rapid development of modern technology, the space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and low altitude. Near space has also become the new battlefield of modern warfare and one an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
And a variety of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a key role in future joint combat operations combining space and Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged the PLA Air Force to “accelerate air and space integration and sharpen its offensive and defensive capabilities” earlier in 2014, and military experts pointed to “close to space” as an important link in integration.
Sailors recover a high-altitude balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 5, 2023.
Searches of CNKI, China’s largest online academic database, show Chinese researchers, both military and civilian, who have published more than 1,000 papers and reports on “near space,” many of which focus on to develop “near space flight vehicles.” China has also established a research center to design and manufacture high-altitude balloons and stratospheric airships, or dirigibles, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a top government think tank.
A particular area of interest is surveillance. As China has deployed a vast satellite network for sophisticated long-range surveillance, Chinese military experts have highlighted the advantages of lighter-than-air vehicles.
Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can fly in a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, writes Shi Hong , the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, is a prominent military man. magazine published by an institution linked to the PLA, in an article published by state media in 2022.
In a 2021 video segment run by state news agency Xinhua, a military expert explained how lighter-than-air vehicles can survey and get higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost compared to satellites.
In the video, Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, highlighted the progress of the US, Russia and Israel in the development of these vehicles, adding that China is also making its own “breakthroughs.”
An example of the advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328-foot) unmanned airship known as the “Cloud Chaser .” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said that the car traveled across Asia, Africa and North America in a global flight of 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above. the world.
Another scientist on the team told the newspaper that compared to satellites, stratospheric airships are better for “long-term observation” and have different purposes from disaster warning and environmental research to wireless network construction and aerial reconnaissance. .
Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, discussed the development of lighter-than-air vehicles in a video segment run by state news agency Xinhua in 2021.
Some players, some tools
It is also clear that China is not alone in seeing new uses for a technology that has been used for military reconnaissance since the late 18th century, when French forces uses a balloon corps.
The US is also strengthening its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. In 2021, the United States Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace company to work on the use of their stratospheric balloons as a way “to create a more complete picture of the operation and use the effects of battlefield,” according to a statement from the company, Raven Aerostar, at the time.
“This is not just a matter of China. The US, and other countries as well, are working and developing high-altitude aerostats, balloons and similar vehicles,” said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute. (CASI) , a research center serving the US Air Force.
“They are inexpensive, provide long-term consistent visibility for the collection of imagery, communications and other information — including weather,” said Mulvaney, who wrote a 2020 paper detailing China’s interest. to use lighter-than-air vehicles for “close-space reconnaissance.”
China also appears to be aware that there is potential for other countries to use surveillance balloons.
In 2019, a documentary series on China’s border defense forces produced by a state-owned television channel showed an incident in which the PLA Air Force spotted and shot down a suspected high -altitude surveillance balloons that “threaten (China’s) air defense safety.”
The documentary did not provide further details about the time and location of the incident, but a paper published in April by researchers at a PLA institute noted that air-drift balloons were found in China in 1997 and 2017. .
Other experts point to the potential use of the balloons to collect data that could help China develop hypersonic weapons that pass near space.
“Understanding the atmospheric conditions there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence. Center.
Chinese state media reports indicate that China has also used balloons to test advanced hypersonic vehicles. In 2019, state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel showed footage of a balloon taking off for what it described as maiden testing of three miniaturized models of “wide-range aircraft,” which according to Chinese media reports, can fly. at a wide range of speeds, up to five times the speed of sound.
A 2019 report aired by state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel showed footage of a balloon taking off for what it described as the first test of three miniaturized models of “wide-range aircraft.”
Balloon thing
U.S. intelligence officials believe the Chinese balloon that the U.S. has been aware of in recent days is part of a broad, military-run surveillance program involving a fleet of balloons. which has conducted at least two dozen missions on at least five continents in recent years, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Beijing on Thursday said the probe was “most likely about US information and public opinion warfare” against China. It maintained that the device identified by the US was civilian in nature, and linked it to “companies,” although it declined to provide more information on which entity made the balloons.
Both the self-governing islands of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged the past, sharing the same view, although it is unclear whether this is related to the US incident.
A US military commander on Monday acknowledged that the US had a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three more suspected Chinese spy balloons to travel over the US continent undetected by the previous administration.
An FBI team is working to understand more about the equipment reclaimed from the ocean-shot balloon — including what kind of data it can collect and whether it can be transmitted in real time.
CASI’s Mulvaney said that if the balloon itself had been described as “dual use” or “state-owned,” the data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another type of information from the incident.
“At the end of the day the responses and (tactics, techniques, and methods) from the US and other countries in how they react, or fail — all of that is of value to China and the PLA.”
CNN’s Brad Lendon and Eric Cheung contributed to this report.
