People saying to use a gun don't really know what they are talking about. The service ceiling of the F22 is reported at 65K feet, it's equipped with a 20mm Vulcan cannon, which the spec sheet designates for use within 2,000 feet, best estimate for maximum "effective" range is a few thousand feet more than that, horizontally mind you. That means if the balloon were over 70K feet no gun on this planet let alone US service could have touched it. Not even the most advanced rail guns could shoot that high The next part of this discussion is missile talk which becomes a sketchy conversation quickly when you realize manufacturers and the governments buying these arms have every reason to lie to the public about their capabilities to some degree, but I doubt the degree of number fudging could possibly exceed 40%. new sidewinders can supposedly travel 20 miles on a target lock, BUT, that's horizontally and fired from a optimal speed position in the air, fired straight up and the efficiency for a missile rapidly collapses just like a bullet, so no surface to air or even safe cruising altitude combat jets could likely reach the balloon with a missile if it were at the upper range of height our military claimed(80Kft+). Knowing the capability of missiles is sort of fucked, they want civies and foreign nations to know fuck all about technical details like vertical range versus horizontal range, if I were a rocket scientist I could give you a better answer but I'm not, I know bullets and I know most of the range in the max range on the longest range kinetic weapons is based on the fact that they are falling for half or more of their flight time and therefore range is really based on arcs and falling with style, going straight up a typical bullet loses about 50% of it's reach. With missiles you need to multiply the weight of your fuel by something like 4-6 for every time you want to double your vertical reach meaning real ICBMS resemble challenger mission rockets in scale. For context on scale, railguns or artillery pieces shouldn't be able to reach commercial flights at roughly 30K feet, most light arms, like anything firing an intermediate riffle round like 5.56 or 7.62x39, can't even reach the bottom of a blackhawk helicopter at cruising height. The options to take down the balloon were call elon musk and waste a rocket, find an old minuteman reaching it's expiration that isn't on the maintenance list and hope the balloon get's low enough near it(It seems they did this and failed the evening before) or scramble your best high altitude fighter, stall that bitch past the top of safe operations and fire a missile at it, and hope the guidance fins and and other systems don't malfunction under these untested conditions (that's exactly what happened as evidenced by the curvature of vapor trails and their disappearance). scrambling a jet with a kill mission is wildly expensive, a missile on the verge of retirement could be more financially sound and option Recognizing the chinks made a neat balloon that we should capture and it might be boobytrapped or thorium powered means we shouldn't pop it over the land. The carriage not being horizontal indicates it took damage, the holding pattern over canada after the bad storm about a month ago ahead of Christmas likely snapped some chinesium support wires holding up the carriage and it's movement became limited, likely lacking the power to meaningfully fly against the wind as the main thrusters(or the like) lost the optimum angle for propulsion, meaning it got trapped in the wind currents and did its best to plot a course over known US installations. Some kikes are claiming we blocked outgoing transmissions from the spy balloon but I really doubt that on my understanding of those physics as well. A final visual lesson, from a man about to fall asleep in his chair, imagine pouring a bath into your bathtub, then imagine dropping a pill bug to the bottom of that water, the bathwater represents the atmosphere, the pill bug represents the effective range of any light arms.