Thank you very much. That's exactly what I wanted to know about the effort involved.
That said, we know that China has been working hard since about 2018 to gain expertise in surveillance balloons. I would imagine that the folks at NORAD were aware of these efforts by China.
Couldn't these developments have been done earlier? Was it because it wasn't perceived as a threat that we didn't develop this ability to detect both large objects and smaller ones more quickly?