It definitely looks like something ballistic tears through the balloon:

I think they modified a missile to house a dummy payload instead of an explosive. I wonder how many tests of air-to-air missile launches from F22's at 50,000+ feet there've been. Air's so much less dense up there. To maintain lift, you've really gotta go screaming through it at quite the pace. How much that might affect missile launch? Dunno.

And the three balloons during the Trump era? Sounds like they went undetected by the Pentagon, but that the intel agencies either knew about them in real time or after the fact, and then proceeded to keep Trump's appointees completely un-briefed on them. I'd imagine the previous balloons/payloads were smaller, since all three avoided detection by civilians.

The latest yuge balloon seems like quite the stupid play by China. Certainly, the Chinese reaction to the U.S. reaction has been laughably stupid, at least.

This is already such a better discussion than anything involving all of the people too stupid to google "How high can you shoot a gun?" (it's not even 1/4 of the way up to the balloon's altitude).