« WorldChanging on the 21st Century | Main | 666 »

"Sputnik crashed here"

A piece of Sputnik crashed in Manitowoc, Wisconsin in 1962. It's displayed today in Manitowoc's Rahr-West Art Museum. It's actually a replica; the original was shipped back to the then-Soviet Union. [Link]

The local newspaper at the time painted a less dramatic picture. The hunk had been embedded three inches deep into the asphalt of 8th Street, just off the center line, for an hour before patrolmen Marvin Bauch and Ronald Rusboldt noticed it from their squad car. Piece of Sputnik.They thought that it was a piece of cardboard and ignored it. An hour later they noticed it again, stopped to move it, and found that it was too hot to touch. They then thought that it was a piece of slag from a local foundry that had fallen out of a dump truck. They kicked it to the curb.

It wasn't until noon that Bauch and Rusboldt associated what they had seen with the reported breakup of Sputnik. They returned to the spot and found it, still in the gutter, more than seven hours after it had fallen. A check at the fire department with a Geiger counter showed no radioactivity, so the lump was shipped to the Smithsonian.

Nine days after the crash, satisfied that what they had was essentially just a hunk of metal, the Americans offered most of it back to the Soviets. The Russians huffed and puffed and finally accepted, carrying away the hunk in a box -- but not before NASA had made two replicas. One was given to Wisconsin's democratic senator, the other to Wisconsin's republican representatives, on the one-year anniversary of the crash. Neither wanted them, and so both ended up back in Manitowoc, even though Manitowoc itself only wanted one.

jon posted this at 8:27 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky