Dealing with unclear boundaries

A large, unidentified spherical object hovers over a critical US Military base, while another is tracked moving through South America. Isn’t that how alien invasion movies start?

Our visitation by a Chinese “weather balloon” last week was an unusually fun news story. Oddly, the conspiracy theory folks have been fairly quiet about our recent experience. You may recall that the phenomenon causing the Pentagon to take a second look at UFOs (now UAPs) in 2020, was a spherical aircraft that, from a distance, looks a lot like our weather balloon. Those moved considerably faster than our lumbering blimp, but who’s to say that our balloon wasn’t holding back?

Our columnist Dick Trail, whose military and aviation bona fides are not to be scoffed at, has rightly concluded that we will likely not know all of the details of last week’s incursion into US airspace during our lifetimes. I agree with Mr. Trail wholeheartedly and also suspect that we must have had some ulterior motive to allow the balloon to enter our airspace in the first place. The balloon in question would have had a significant radar signature, so I can’t believe that they could sneak into our airspace without our knowing, nor do I believe that our Air Force would allow anything to enter our airspace that was deemed a threat.

My friends on the far-right point to the incursion and cross-country adventure as an example of our current administration’s weak National Security Policy. Given our leaky southern border and the sad execution of our departure from Afghanistan, that belief is not without legs, but I wouldn’t be so quick to apply it to this particular situation. I strongly believe that there are more factors in play than meets the eye. The Republicans may take delight in knowing that the Biden Administration can’t respond with a full explanation, but I don’t think they are wise to hang their hat on this one.

I also don’t buy China’s explanation of a force majeure, or an errant wind that caused the balloon to stray off course. One needs only to see how the balloon expertly followed the string of Aleutian Islands up into Alaska to recognize the “wind” explanation as a simple case of bovine excrement. We don’t believe for a second that those were random movements, and the CCP knows that we don’t believe them. Diplomatic dialogue is a formality-laden kabuki dance designed to avoid conflict and when necessary, save face. I’m not sure if it’s working for the Chinese this time, because something clearly went wrong and they won’t be getting their balloon back.

As for the movement across the country, I initially wondered if we had hacked into the balloon and were controlling its movements. That would explain the CCP’s perfunctory diplomatic explanations, but if we were in control, it seems that we could have landed it safely without having to knock it out of the sky. I have set that theory aside for now.

I am back to the conclusion that the events of last week will remain a mystery for years to come, so I switched my attention to the larger question of, “where does our sovereign airspace end, and space begins?” It is well known that we are overflown by the satellites of our adversaries on a daily basis, just as we do to them and as far as I know, no satellites are being shot down. At the same time, if a military or commercial aircraft wanders into the protected airspace of another country, it is at the very least an international incident and can potentially lead to the downing of an aircraft.

So where do we draw the line? At what altitude do our sovereign air rights turn into the wild west (or blue yonder)? The answer to that question was not as simple or quick as I had hoped. It’s actually quite messy.

Our FAA classifies airspace as “Class A” that extends from 18,000 feet to what the FAA calls flight level 600, or just “FL 600.” That’s about 60,000 feet. Below 18,000 feet, the airspace is carved up at various levels designated by letters of the alphabet down to the letter “E, ” which includes the roof of your barn. Just to make life interesting, the FAA also classifies the space above FL 600 as class ”E” as well. Are we confused yet?

I was certain that there must be an altitude at which satellites could move about freely without paying any regard to national boundaries, but I didn’t find one. What I found was that we currently have no international agreements in place establishing a vertical limit to sovereignty. The texts I found did note that at somewhere around 60 miles above sea level, earth’s gravity is weak enough that terrestrial aircraft don’t want to come back down, but that’s a bit more gray area than I was hoping for.

Having not found a simple, clear answer to my question, I set out to understand altitude and airspace from a historical perspective. Most of us know that our commercial jets fly at an altitude somewhere between 33,000 to 42,000 feet. The Concorde SST cruised right at FL600, or 60,000 feet and the U-2 spy plane that made Kruschev pound his shoe on his U.N. desk in 1960 had a ceiling of 70,000 feet. Before being replaced by satellites, our newer spy plane, the SR-71 flew at 90,000 feet.

90,000 feet translates to 17 miles and some spare change, but from there up, the conversation takes place almost entirely in miles or kilometers. The Sputnik satellite that unnerved us enough to launch the Apollo program orbited the earth at 359 miles. Our international space station orbits at about 254 miles and our communications satellites in geostationary orbit are way out at about 22,000 miles. We know that it’s getting crowded up there, but as long as technologies are state secrets, we won’t know very much very soon. The short answer seems to be that our sovereign airspace is defined by what we can, and are willing to shoot down–and that capability grows daily.

Back in the late 1980s, I read an article suggesting that the emerging field of “space law” was an up-and-coming field and a promising career choice. I didn’t see a widespread need for it then, but I certainly see it now. It’s a bit too late for me to make that a profession, but if you know of any kids looking for ideas, that would be a good one. These things need to be argued and decided, and space law seems to be here to stay.