'Unfortunate and Amusing': Balloon Enthusiasts Undeterred by U.S. Air Force Shootdowns

“I come humbly to all of you, my friends,” Bowen wrote on a picoballooning community listserv. “I am pleading, imploring, you to consider not launching pico balloons for a while worldwide.”

Bowen’s request was just one of a flurry of posts on forums and listservs in response to the downing of the Chinese balloon, and the subsequent destruction of three more objects from February 10 to 12, some of which may well have been amateur picoballoons, according to circumstantial evidence. For instance, one hobbyist ballooning group announced that one of their picoballoons went missing over Canada's Yukon at the same time as one of the objects was shot down. President Biden later announced that the three objects were most likely benign research balloons.

“Looks like a new kind of Balloon cold war is starting…” said one post on February 10.

“You could send them a bill for providing target practice!” another member joked on February 12, referring to the U.S. Armed Forces.

Though picoballoonists may express some gallow’s humor about the downings, many are concerned about how the Great Chinese Balloon Incident of 2023 will impact the future of their hobby. If the media frenzy over China’s spy balloon—which U.S. government officials believe was designed as a surveillance mission, but China insists was for civilian research—has been surreal for outsiders, imagine its effects on the tight knit community of hobbyists who have watched in disbelief as their projects may have literally been placed into the crosshairs of sleek military jets.

“I had that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach,” said Bowen, recalling the day he made the post about holding off on balloon launches, in a call with Motherboard. “I was like, ‘it’s over.’ We knew it would come eventually. We really didn't think it would go that way.”

“Now, it's into the thoughtful—and the heated—discussion stage where we're trying to just hash out what we think is going to happen and how we might react to that,” added Bowen, who has built a wide-ranging career as a balloon consultant. “The fears are dying down, but now we're waiting and speculating at this point.”

Even as the community holds its breath in anticipation of a government response, many have seen a silver lining in the bizarre events that unfolded after the detection of the Chinese spy balloon.

“It's a mix of unfortunate and amusing,” said Doug Malnati, a balloon enthusiast who runs a picoballooning website, in an email to Motherboard. “Certainly the spy balloon is a completely different sentiment, that's unfortunate. But the detection of other users of the airspace (pico folks) is good in some ways, and somewhat amusing to see the reactions of people who weren't familiar with the hobby.”

“The pico community has seen an increase in membership as well as less active members coming back thanks to the publicity,” he added. “The coverage can be a good thing for bringing in new members as well.”

These lightweight balloons are launched by enthusiasts who track their voyages across the world and share observations with like-minded people in forums, listservs, and meetups. Though launching picoballoons is more technical than you might expect given their apparent simplicity, they are still accessible enough for use by beginners who might be curious about everything from amateur radio networks to the flow of global jet streams.  

“They go up, they level off, and then they go around the world,” Steve Randall, a balloon expert who runs Random Aerospace, a company based in the U.K., said in a call with Motherboard. “One imagines, actually, there's quite a lot of stuff out there. People have a party, and they just let the balloons go, and they go around the world. We started off that way, really, just putting a very small tracker on a balloon to see what it would do.”

“A lot of picoballoons are almost identical to those grocery store silver balloons,” Bowen noted. “If you release one of those outside, there's a good chance that it floats for a year going around the planet, alone without a payload. There’s obviously zero danger, but it has probably happened more than once.”

Though the art of uncrewed ballooning dates back many centuries, the picoballooning community is surprisingly young, having emerged only within the past decade.

“It’s fairly recent—by ballooning standards anyway,” Randall said. “There's no formal definition of what picoballoon is, but for the people that do it, what we're talking about is some very small pieces of equipment on some very small balloons.”

How small are we talking? Most picoballoons measure about three feet across on the ground, though some can expand to about three or four times that size in the air. Their flights can carry simple lightweight instruments such as HAM radios, solar cells, weather sensors, and trackers that cumulatively weigh up to about half an ounce, about the same as an AAA battery. 

According to Bowen, the picoballooning movement essentially emerged in response to new regulations that limited the size of recreational balloons, spurring hobbyists to create smaller fliers and payloads for a range of purposes. These creative improvements also had the effect of making balloon flights more affordable and accessible—you can launch these wispy fliers for less than $20—resulting in a new subculture of picoballoonists with a wide variety of backgrounds.

For instance, students frequently launch picoballoons as educational projects, and many of these modest flights are also equipped to collect meteorological data that supports the work of government agencies such as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

For most in the community, though, the main draw of these balloons is that they are simply a lot of fun. That’s why so many picoballoonists were so astonished and distressed to see their hobby suddenly sucked into the geopolitical turbulence that followed the downing of the Chinese spy balloon. The frenzy over the incident has the community reeling at the sudden attention over the risk that governments will pass cumbersome new regulations that could make it much more difficult to pursue.

“It'd be a great shame if it was impacted, particularly for schools and even the NOAA data point of view,” Randall said. “They’re really quite useful, so we would be very, very upset if we lose this activity.”

The Chinese balloon, which was shot down with a short-range missile on February 4, was 200-feet-tall and weighed several thousand pounds, according to government officials. It was more massive, by many orders of magnitude, than any picoballoon. Yet defense officials on high alert still scanned the skies for other possible spy balloons, and downed three other objects from February 10 to 12 that were flying over Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and Lake Huron. 

Picoballoonists use tracking maps to monitor flights of their balloons as they drift through the skies. For this reason, many people in the community watched on with bated breath as balloons on the map drifted into North America. Bowen said that the object downed in the Yukon met “the exact description” of a picoballoon called K9YO-15, launched by the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which had circled the world six times over the course of several months before its trip was ended by an encounter with an F-22.   

“Obviously, when we look at this, I don't think any of this would have happened without the Chinese balloon,” Randall said. “What’s happened is that they’ve turned down the threshold on what they look for in the sky and we are now popping up. We must be some very small objects, to be honest, these types of balloons must only just present a radar return.”

To use a technical term, it’s bananas that a $143 million stealth tactical fighter jet may have been shooting $400,000 missiles at tiny harmless picoballoons that are typically worth less than $200. It’s a response that seems as if it belongs in some long-lost Stanley Kubrick project that was abandoned for being too on-the-nose. 

“It does seem a bit disproportionate, to be honest,” Randall said. “It seems a bit of an overreaction in general, but the world's in a twitchy place at the moment.”

For the most part, though, the whole phantasmagorical mania seems to have been confined to the week following the Chinese balloon incident, and most hobbyists are no longer concerned that their balloons are in danger of meeting missiles in the skies. 

“The spy balloon was huge (the size of three buses carrying 2,000+ lbs of equipment),” Malnati said. “A pico balloon is a party balloon two feet wide and carries a few pennies of weight. There is clearly a spectrum of size to consider. Party balloons are released on accident and on purpose regularly, I don't think we'll see F22s shooting them out of the sky each time.”

While the risk of downings has now likely receded, many picoballoonists are concerned about statements from lawmakers that could spell trouble for the hobby on the horizon.

"We'll update the rules and regulations for launching and maintaining unmanned objects in the skies above the United States of America," President Joe Biden said in an address on February 16. "My Secretary of State will lead an effort to help establish common global norms in this largely unregulated space."

It’s true that there are not many regulations that apply to picoballoons, mainly because the risk that these objects could cause damage to air or ground infrastructure is so astronomically low as to be essentially negligible. The rules are different in every country, but in the U.S., you don’t currently need Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) clearance to launch a balloon under four pounds, which applies to all picoballoons, nor do you need to include radar reflectors or ADS-B trackers that are required on heavier balloons and other aircraft.

Hobbyists are particularly worried that governments may start demanding that picoballons carry the heftier ADS-B trackers, which would make most of these lightweight flights impossible.

“They would make these balloons 10, 20, or 30 times more heavy, and you’d need bigger balloons to carry the weight,” Randall explained. “These [picoballoons] are smaller than a bird, smaller than a sparrow, in terms of weight and they're very fragile. The solar cells on them are like egg shells when you connect them up.” 

Requiring ADS-B trackers on these flights “would be the end, really, of the activity,” he continued. “These are just so small that it would be infeasible or impractical.”

Even picoballoonists await the responses of lawmakers, some have advocated for taking a more active approach to the problem by offering their own solutions based on their experience with the hobby.

“What I've been thinking is the only good response we might have, to get out ahead of this, might be to propose drastically reduced regulations of our own that go to the point where we could still fly,” Bowen said. “It would be much more difficult for us, but it would go a long ways towards assuaging people's fear and reactions.”

For instance, Bowen suggested that hobbysists could alert the FAA about the details of their flights before launching, and include radar reflectors, which are not as bulky as the ADS-B trackers, to their balloons. These reflectors would amplify the presence of the balloons on radar screens, making them more visible to anyone in nearby airspace. Along the same lines, Randall thinks that raising awareness of the community’s tracking maps could help interested parties understand what is a potential threat in the skies, and what is simply a high-school science project. 

Many picoballoonists also hope that any new rules will apply only to larger balloons, mostly because regulating picoballons would be such a dizzying task 

“I expect regulation will affect objects in the sky from the mid-sized and up,” said Malnati. “Mid-sized and up are realistically the size of balloons which can carry enough equipment to do anything meaningfully constructive or otherwise. A party balloon is simply too irrelevant and too difficult to bother with.”

“Pico enthusiasts are all law abiding folks, and in fact, to transmit the balloon location requires studying for and being tested in order to obtain FAA certifications/credentials,” he noted. “I am sure the community would abide by whatever laws are passed. But you can't stop the bad balloon people.”

“There's a huge number of people looking at it now, and quite a few people just interested in what's involved in launching the balloons,” Randall said. “This is quite technical. You need to do quite a lot of things in the right order for your balloon to succeed so that they're learning that by interaction on the channels.”

In this way, even as lawmakers mull how to respond to the giant spy balloon, the worldwide network of picoballoonists is, well, inflating. For many hobbyists, this influx of interest is a much-needed silver lining that has mitigated the fears, anxieties, and plain bafflement that so many in the community have experienced over the past month.  

“I hope the community keeps doing what it's doing and new people come and join,” Malnati said. “I hope the government compiles an interesting list of everything they spot in the sky and publish it. I hope that list is sensibly assessed by the defense department for what is/isn't a concern and the approach of regulating what they need to and leaving the rest to the public stands!”