China’s spy balloon isn’t as low-tech as you might think.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have heard about the Chinese spy balloon that entered US airspace last week and entered the hearts of millions of Americans, as well as in highly protected and classified areas such as military bases and missile silos.

But in case you need a primer: The US Department of Defense announced on February 2nd that it was tracking a balloon flying at about 60,000 feet over Billings, Montana. The object entered US airspace over the Aleutian Islands on January 28th before passing through Canada and eventually drifting eastward across the US, eventually being shot down over South Carolina on February 4th.

China’s foreign ministry said it was simply a “civilian airship for research” and “meteorological purposes” and later dismissed the decision to shoot down as “obviously excessive bitterness”. The air craft is a Chinese spy balloon, and most foreign experts widely agree that it was built to spy on America.

Now, the Pentagon, along with other counterintelligence officials, are working to reverse-engineer it to rescue the downed spy balloon.

“We don’t really know all the benefits they’re going to get,” a senior defense official said in a background briefing on Saturday. But we learned technical things about this balloon and its spying capabilities. And I suspect we will learn more if we are successful in recovering aspects of the wreckage.

Perhaps one of the biggest mysteries to solve is why China would use something as beautiful as a balloon to spy on the US, especially considering Beijing’s massive arsenal. Sophisticated and advanced surveillance technology from satellites, drones, to hackers able to infiltrate US databases to steal classified information, information and money.

However, a look at history shows that the US and China, as well as other countries of geopolitical importance, have a long history of using balloons to target other countries and occasionally their own citizens.

“American surveillance balloons were first used during our Civil War and before the advent of sophisticated satellite surveillance in the 1960s. [the U.S.] They used balloons especially at military borders,” Locke K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia and an intelligence expert, told The Daily Beast.

As time went on, the balloon wars escalated. During World War II, Japan used bomb-carrying balloons as proto-warfare drones, floating them across the Pacific Ocean and eventually transporting them to the United States to drop their payloads on unsuspecting civilians. At the height of the Cold War, balloons such as Project Moby Dick were used by the US Air Force to take photographs of Soviet military sites. The use of balloons to track ground activity dates back to the new millennium, when the US sent them to Iraq and Afghanistan.

why? Simple: It’s cheap. Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a satellite and launch it into orbit—rather than millions more to take care of it—when you fill a latex balloon with helium, attach a camera to it, and send it on a merry-go-round? With a few modifications, such a balloon could be made to travel to lower or higher altitudes, giving it more flexibility in how close to Earth it wants to be and how long it wants to hover there.

These spy balloons can get information that a satellite in low-Earth orbit and without being seen would not necessarily be able to get. They can fly higher than most aircraft, which allows them to remain invisible to the naked eye on the ground. Their speed of travel allows them to go unnoticed by slow radar. Compared to satellites, the lower altitude allows for “higher camera quality,” Johnson added. So a helium balloon can float above any unsuspecting crowd in a real spy sweet spot.

“Balloons are cheap and relatively maneuverable — although they sometimes get blown in unexpected directions by unexpected winds,” Johnson said. He added that spy satellites capture “every imaginable bell and whistle” in cameras and listening devices. Therefore, they are guaranteed sinks of wealth to maintain, let alone enter orbit.

Meanwhile, the balloons can reach up to 90,000 feet and be equipped with various systems to detect missiles, track the terrain and defend itself.

Of course, that wasn’t necessarily the case with the Chinese spy balloon that appeared last week. The reason why the balloon was so low in the sky and visible to people on the ground is still a mystery, but some believe that the balloon may have deviated from its intended path, which is a geopolitical egg on Beijing’s face. This also highlights a very obvious flaw in this type of technology: it is very dependent on weather and air flow systems. A small change can make it appear – which reduces the whole abstract thing. But that’s part of the risk assessment and it takes a lot of modeling before one of these starts.

But it’s not as if China has decided the risk is worth the money alone. There are also more psychological reasons why the country chose to use balloons: perhaps it wanted to show the US government, and perhaps more importantly, US civilians, that it could easily enter US sovereign airspace if it so desired. China’s move is now public, but now it has an opportunity to gauge America’s response, which could inform future planning and decision-making for more serious actions, such as sending drones or manned aircraft.

“They have another way of spying on American infrastructure or whatever information they want,” said Benjamin Ho, China Program Coordinator at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. BBC News. “The balloon was to send a signal to the Americans and also to see how the Americans would react.”

However, Johnson has a more direct view.

“This was very stupid of the Chinese on the eve of potentially important high-level talks with the US Secretary of State,” he said. “That’s why I guess a lower party official green-lighted this misadventure while trying to cheaply add satellite data.

This is silly, especially since Chinese and American satellites have more than enough cameras to survey the Earth and “don’t have any added value beyond balloons,” he added.

So while the Chinese spy balloon incident seems to be over for the time being, the reality is that the geopolitical ramifications of this saga are still ongoing. Much remains to be done as to why exactly the balloon was used and why exactly China sent it in such a shameful way. Perhaps it is appropriate that the opening of the Cold War with China began not with a bang, but with a balloon popping.