The New Yorker:

Even balloons launched for scientific reasons have always carried political ballast.

By Rivka Galchen

By international agreement, each day at noon and midnight G.M.T., rain or shine, weather balloons are released from roughly nine hundred locations around the world. Within a couple of hours, most of them will be beyond the clouds, and still climbing. As they rise, they expand, going from the size of a car to the size of an orca. And then they pop. Usually, a complex device inside them, called a radiosonde, parachutes down to Earth. The radiosonde provides data on temperature, humidity, and air pressure, allowing forecasters around the world to predict sunshine in Montreal on Tuesday and rains in Mumbai on Wednesday. Often enough, someone finds one of the National Weather Service’s radiosondes on the ground, along with its bright-orange parachute. The radiosondes come equipped with mailing bags, so that they can be sent back to the N.O.A.A.’s National Reconditioning Center, in Missouri, and be reused.

Last month, a balloon the size of three buses was spotted over Billings, Montana. The Chinese Foreign Ministry claimed that it was a weather balloon blown off course, which was not entirely implausible. (It later became clear that the balloon was not a weather balloon; afterward, when more balloons were noticed, and shot down, it turned out that at least one of those likely was a weather balloon, and none were spy balloons.) But even balloons deployed for scientific aims have often carried political ballast. In 1783, one of the earliest manned balloons was built with finances from the King of France, launched with great pomp and bearing the fleur-de-lis. After the king’s overthrow, in 1790, another balloon was launched, with the goal “to see if the inhabitants of the moon were free” and, if they were not, to hand them the Declaration of the Rights of Man. That balloon faltered. But a year later, over a crowded Champs-Élysées, a balloon with a rooster-shaped basket (the rooster had become a symbol of the French people) successfully ascended twelve thousand feet. On the way down, the aeronaut, having toasted to freedom, dropped leaflets of the new constitution.

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