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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 or...

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 m...

That would be roughly an 8500 mile trip or 1/3 of the distance around the world. let's look at what it came over on the way here. when we had these spottings here, it gave us an idea of the path it was following through the united states here. these reports maybe it was guided to some degree, but this matches up pretty well with what the jet stream would do with any balloon out there. what did it pass over? close to a dozen nuclear facilities, missile facilities. five or six large military facilities on the way and some fairly big towns. it got reasonably close to kansas city, st. louis, nashv...

Glimmering in the light as it floats down back to earth. there's the envelope once more. there was a huge restricted piece of air space put in place by the faa. what i think is likely the largest piece of restricted air space ever put in place by the faa. we're talking about 150 miles by 150 miles. to put this into context, that's about five times the size of the restricted air space over washington, d.c. twice the size of the state of massachusetts because these military fighters were essentially circling like sharks waiting for the right moment to strike here. we have found out from presiden...

And i want to compliment our aviators that did it. we'll have more to report on this a little later. thank you. >> mr. president, what do you say about -- >> what's your message to china? >> you're saying your recommendation was from -- >> i told them to shoot it down. >> on wednesday? >> on wednesday. >> but the recommendation -- >> they said to me let's wait until the safest place to do it. >> so the president quite emphatic there that he did give that order on wednesday. of course, he had been facing a slew of criticism from republicans up on capitol hill who had slammed the president for n...