It is not impossible that the three objects that the United States shot down last weekend have links to extraterrestrials. But it is much more likely that they are simply related to the growing space economy.
Over the past weekend, the United States shot down three unidentified objects over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron. Last Tuesday, the spokesman for the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, stated that there is no evidence that any of them were related to the collection of information by Chinese intelligence services, unlike the spy balloon shot down earlier this month.
Although the US government has yet to analyze the remains, Kirby said a “main explanation” in the intelligence community is that the objects “could simply be balloons linked to commercial or research entities and therefore benign.” , comments of which echoed the president of the United StatesJoe Biden on Thursday. On Monday, Kirby said that “objects at these altitudes are used by a number of entities — including countries, companies, and academic and research organizations — for non-evil purposes, such as scientific research.”
These entities, none of which have claimed ownership of the objects, include the 90 countries and approximately 10,000 companies currently involved in the global space industry. Over the past decade, investments from governments, corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have propelled the industry to a valuation of nearly $500 billion by 2021. By 2030, it is expected to exceed $1 trillion, according to a Bank of America report for January.
BofA defines the space economy as “the full range of activities and use of resources that create and provide value and benefits to humans in the field of exploration, understanding, management and use of space”, including research and development. , the manufacture of space infrastructures and scientific research linked to industry.
According to the report, approximately 80% of the global space economy was linked to commercial space products and services in 2021, while 20% was linked to government investments.
In 2022, the European Union announced that it would invest some $15 billion over the next five years in space exploration, Earth monitoring, and satellite launch programs. In the United States, NASA and the Department of Defense are the industry’s biggest clients, awarding contracts to companies such as Boeing, SpaceX and Lockheed Martin.
It is not clear to what extent the space industry uses balloons and similar objects. But on Monday, the White House said that President Biden will create a team to analyze unidentified objects in US airspace. According to Kirby, this will include contacting companies that produce weather balloons or similar objects to find out “who is at that altitude, doing what, for completely legitimate purposes.”
“I think we all recognize that we probably need to have a better big picture on this, and so the president wants this interagency effort to take a look,” Kirby said.
But given that the United States has had more than 500 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomena” since 2021, according to a national intelligence report released in January, some people have wondered why this team was just created now.
“On the one hand, the Administration is saying that we still don’t know what these last three objects are and we don’t want to do any typing until we get them back,” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton told reporters. “But on the other hand, it wasn’t a threat. Both things can’t be true.”
