Congress floats ways to secure skies after Chinese balloon

WASHINGTON — As the only current U.S. senator to have visited space, Mark Kelly knows something about unexplained objects in the skies.

Back in his aviator days, Kelly saw Mylar party balloons fly by his cockpit. And once when he was piloting a NASA aircraft, he spotted an object at roughly 45,000 feet — much higher than commercial airplanes fly — that he couldn’t identify by sight.

He’s not sure he would want to see American missiles flying at those objects, either.

“I don’t think we want to get into the business of launching AIM-9Xs — at $400,000 a pop — at weather balloons,” Kelly told The Associated Press, referring to the heat-seeking, air-to-air missiles used in recent weeks to shoot down a series of aerial objects, including a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.

The Biden administration’s unprecedented peacetime downing of the Chinese balloon and three other objects has raised new and troubling questions about the security of American airspace, alarming lawmakers who fear the episode has exposed a vulnerability that could be exploited by other foreign adversaries.

While the House and the Senate both voted unanimously to condemn China’s ruling political party for the incursion and largely supported the Biden administration’s decision to shoot down the balloon, they have questions about what’s next.

Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who has been tasked with heading up an investigation into how the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to pass over crucial U.S. missile sites, said that he would ensure the Defense Department has funds for a protocol to assess the threat of unidentified flying objects.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we have a plan going forward to detect and then find out what potential problems this balloon may cause and then a way to bring it down that doesn’t cost us a $400,000 missile,” Tester, who chairs the Defense subcommittee on appropriations, told Fox News Channel.

Concerns over China, which has criticized the U.S. for “an obvious overreaction,” and worries about interference with civilian aircraft are shared by members of both political parties, creating the potential in Congress to mount a robust bipartisan response. But lawmakers are also mindful of adding yet more military costs — the U.S. already spends more than $800 billion yearly on defense programs — and are wary of expensive shooting sprees for every random object that appears in America’s skies.

Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, is working on legislation that would require weather balloons to carry transponders that could communicate with air traffic control systems to separate research balloons from mysterious objects where “we don’t know what that is. We don’t know where it came from.”

“It would really help the Defense Department to be able to sort out what is civilian science payload, what’s a weather balloon, what’s a NASA balloon, what’s a private company in the United States doing, what might be even a U.S. military,” said Kelly, who logged 54 days in space as an astronaut before jumping into politics.