you re live in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta. we are following breaking news at this hour. the president declaring moments ago that he ordered the pentagon to shoot down the chinese spy balloon as soon as possible. the u.s. is in a recovery effort after a u.s. fighter jet launched a precision strike on the chinese spy balloon. it came after days of watching it float from montana, to missouri to the carolinas. here is another video of that strike. this is a tense moment in u.s./china relations. the world will be watching in the hours and days ahead. let s get straight to cnn s oren liebermann at the pentagon. oren, what more are you learning? i understand you were listening to officials explain how all of this went down. what can you tell us? it started on wednesday when president joe biden gave the authorization to shoot down the chinese balloo n as soon as possible. there were tankers and others to shoot this down. it was an f-22 that fired an a 9 side wind er. the ai
planes are now back in the air all along the kcarolina coast just ahead of the efforts to shoot down the balloon which occurred a short while ago. we ve been following that all afternoon. pete muntean joins us now. pete, when the faa put out that notification, that was a pretty clear indication as to where this was heading. yeah. you know, the faa really sort of gave off the signals with arrows in red pointing towards exactly what was going to happen here. the shootdown that took place not far off the coast of the carolinas. you can see in the video there the contrails of the f-22 and the missile as it goes for that chinese spy balloon. the dot in the center there apparently the envelope of that balloon and we ve seen in other videos. the impact of the aim 9 side winder missile into the balloon and the instrument array below it falling to the ground