Near the intersection of two suburban streets, one of hundreds in the U.S town of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, there is a small brass ring imbedded in the road. This marks the exact point where, in September 1962, the Space Age came to Manitowoc. 1/9 
On May 15, 1960 the unmanned Korabl-Sputnik 1, known as Sputnik 4 in the West, left Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan for a 4-day mission to study life support systems & the stresses of flight. The craft radioed both extensive telemetry and prerecorded voice communications. 2/9
Although the mission was a success, there was a problem on reentry. The spacecraft was not in the correct attitude when its retro fired, & the spherical descent module separated from the instrument module but neither reentered as planned. They remained in orbit for years. 3/9
The descent module’s orbit decayed and it finally reentered the atmosphere on September 5, 1962, breaking into fiery debris high above Wisconsin. 4/9
In Manitowoc at 5:30 AM, patrolmen Ronald Rusboldt & Marvin Bausch saw what they thought was an irregularly shaped piece of cardboard in the middle of the street. When they came again around 7:00 AM, they saw it was definitely metal, so they stopped to remove it as a hazard. 5/9
They were surprised to find the object imbedded in the asphalt and too hot to handle, but managed to move it to the side of the street. Later that day the object was still lying by the curb, so they took it to police headquarters. 6/9
By now reports of a fiery reentry that morning were coming in so suspicions were that this was part of a mystery spacecraft. Little was known in the West of the secretive Soviet space program then. Members of the Milwaukee Astronomical Society were called to help identify it. 7/9
A cut piece of the object revealed a bolt that had metric threads. A piece was melted to release radioactive isotopes. They found isotopes which could have only been formed by cosmic rays in the Van Allen belts. The object was therefore deemed a genuine part of Sputnik 4. 8/9
While other pieces were found across a wide swath of Wisconsin, this is the only one of which the exact point of impact has been preserved. A small plaque in the sidewalk near the brass ring in the street commemorates this unusual event in the early years of the Space Race. 9/9
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