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A Chinese spy balloon flying all over the US was shot down over the coast of South Carolina by a fighter jet on Saturday. 

A Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor jet from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia took the shot at 2:39 p.m. The surveillance balloon was hit with a single supersonic, heat-seeking, air-to-ground AIM-9X missile. It had been traveling at an altitude of 18,000 meters (58,000 feet).

The surveillance balloon had been making its way around to sensitive military installations including missile silo sites. And the pentagon says it was intelligence-gathering in the U.S.

Air Force General Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command reported that the balloon was 200 feet (60 meters) tall and carried equipment weighing about two thousand pounds.

Biden gave orders on Wednesday for the shoot-down. But it was three days before the military was certain it could be brought down without any risk to civilians.

Not the first time Chinese Spy balloon

General Glen VanHerck said on Monday the military had not detected previous spy balloons over the U.S. before January 28, but he confia rmed there were several in the last decade. And called the oversight an "awareness gap."

"I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that's a domain awareness gap," VanHerck said.

Officials did not disclose if they were able to get any of the balloon’s “payload” to analyze. It is expected there will be cameras and spying sensors carried by the balloon. And the military hopes that the shoot-down was a success from an intelligence-gathering perspective.

 The Pentagon says that similar balloons have been spotted all over Asia and Europe. And there have been recent confirmed sightings Costa Rica and Venezuela.

“Shooting the balloon down addressed the surveillance threat posed to military installations and further neutralized any intelligence value it could have produced, preventing it from returning to the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” said an unnamed defense official.

 “In addition, shooting the balloon down could enable the US to recover sensitive PRC equipment.”

China claims the balloons are simply for meteorological observation. And the one the U.S. shot down had just blown off course. They call the episode an “overreaction" by the U.S.