The Balloon That Cost Millions Of Dollars To Pop

Does everybody remember the "Chinese balloon incident," as it might comically be called? It wasn't an alien spacecraft or interdimensional emissary that appeared over the skies of Alaska in January 2023, oh no. It wasn't even a UAP (unidentification aerial phenomenon, by the recent rebranding), but a KAP (known aerial phenomenon — our own term). The very un-futuristic white spy balloon nonchalantly floated into U.S. airspace, sort of whistling while shoving its hands into its pockets. Ridiculously enough, it managed to meander all the way down to South Carolina before getting blasted out of the sky. And what did the U.S. send to do the job? The most advanced warfighting jet in existence: an F-22 (it's even banned from being exported). How advanced are these bad boys? They come with a monstrous price tag of $143 million per jet.

So let's do a little math. The F-22 fired an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at the balloon, which went kaboom and fell into the ocean 6 miles off the coast. The cost of these missiles varies, but the price for just one can run up to $472,000. Similar missiles were also fired at three American non-spy balloons as a consequence of the Chinese balloon, which adds up to $1,888,000 more to total cost of the incident. And if we really want to drive the point home, we can look at F-22 developer Lockheed Martin. F-22s first went into development in 1991, and they've required constant upgrades and maintenance, like a $10.9 billion contract in 2021 to modernize the jets. So how many millions did it cost to blow the Chinese spy balloon out of the sky? Lots.

Yes, destroying a balloon with an F-22 is a bit overkill, like using a tactical nuke to weed your garden. But the dang balloon was flying at a height of 60,000 to 65,000 feet. That's at least 18,000 feet higher than the range of a typical commercial flight. How else are we going to take the balloon out besides a jet? Anti-aircraft missiles are cheaper, but they have to be fired from a launcher. Patriot missiles might do the trick, but they're not set up on U.S. soil. That's if the balloon could even be targeted, which isn't likely because they have "extremely small radar and thermal cross sections" that make them "relatively invulnerable to most traditional tracking and targeting methods," per a report by the Airpower Research Institute. Hence the need for a piloted jet to get up close and personal and physically see the target in question.

Speaking of precision, the F-22 was also the perfect choice because air-to-air missiles, like the F-22's AIM-9X Sidewinders, don't actually strike the target and then explode. This creates more falling debris. As TWZ quotes Brigadier General Pat Ryder, who was Pentagon press secretary at the time: "Even if the probability was low in a sparsely populated area of the debris falling and hurting somebody or damaging property ... [it still] wasn't worth it." Rather, air-to-air missiles use sensors that tell its warhead to explode when it gets close enough to an object. All in all, no matter the price tag, the F-22 was the way to go.

Now we get to the main question that lots of people were asking in the fallout of the 2023 incident: What information did the spy balloon actually collect? Reports are a bit vague, but in June of that year, the BBC stated that the U.S. intelligence community managed to interfere with the balloon's transmissions back to China. At the time, China said the device was a weather balloon and waggled its finger at America for overreacting. 

By December, CNN had reported that the balloon was using a U.S. internet service provider to send location and navigation data to China. The Middle Kingdom maintained that it was a weather balloon blown off course, and Chinese President Xi Jinping said that he "didn't know it was there [in the U.S.]." By February 2025, Newsweek had revealed that the balloon was carrying U.S. tech capable of taking photographs, surveilling data, and possibly even launching gliders to collect more information. Intelligence communities have remained hush-hush, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has refused to comment.

Here's the point: If any unknown sky object was worth destroying in a possibly overblown, overkill fashion, then the Chinese spy balloon might have been it. Take a multi-billion dollar Lockheed Martin F-22 development contract, add to it the cost of purchasing the jets, the costs of further maintenance and upgrade contracts, the cost of the F-22's missiles, and you've got what the jets were designed to do: Protect the U.S. Even if the balloon really did innocently veer off course, the cost was probably worth it.