Floating in his bright red balloon over the sunlit meadows of Fleurus, the engineer Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle looked down on soldiers hacking each other to death with their bayonets. The battle ended with the triumph of French revolutionary arms over the combined houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Hanover and the Habsburgs. Few French generals, though, were inclined to share credit with the twice-a-day surveillance missions conducted by L’Entreprenant, the world’s first military observation balloon.

“This ridiculous innovation would not even deserve to be mentioned if it hadn’t been made out to be something important,” grumbled Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult.

Last month, a People’s Liberation Army surveillance balloon—likely blown off-course from its target in Guam by weather and operator errors—was shot down after it traversed the continental United States, sparking off a bitter diplomatic row. For all the outrage, the spy balloon amounted to little. Two centuries later after L’Entreprenant’s debut in 1794, every corner of the Earth is under almost-constant satellite surveillance.

Eyeball-to-eyeball in outer space, China, Russia and the United States are engaged in a high-stakes, no-rules struggle for supremacy. The spy balloon is just part of an effort to dominate near-earth space—capable of observing an adversary, but out of reach of its means of interception. The means range from China’s spy balloon programme, to robotic aircraft like the United States’ super-secret X-37B.

Faced with similar risks, Russia and the United States signed a treaty to allow spy flights over their territory, allowing both superpowers to develop confidence about the intentions and capabilities of the other. The Open Skies Treaty collapsed in 2020, after Russia blocked spy flights over the strategic enclave of Kaliningrad. But the time might have come, many experts believe, to create norms that similarly regulate—and even facilitate—espionage from space.

Eyeballing the Earth

Low-earth satellites—orbiting at altitudes less than 1,000 kilometres from our planet—have been nudging up against each other for over a decade, experts Matthew Mowthorpe and Markos Trichas have noted. The major powers have all sought to manoeuvre surveillance satellites to within hundreds of metres of those of their adversaries, to spy on their…

To read more: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/chinese-balloon-over-us-a-reminder-time-has-come-to-regulate-facilitate-espionage-from-space/1385000/