Wisconsin and Space

Youngest Son is headed to Oshkosh tomorrow with his Civil Air Patrol group to help set up for the EAA air show (biggest civilian airshow in the nation). It is unpleasantly expensive, so I've only been there once--but we got to see SpaceShip One fly.

Harrison Schmitt is an adjunct professor at the UW-Madison. (I heard him lecture once on lunar geological history.) Deke Slayton and five other astronauts are from Wisconsin.

But for sheer excitement can you beat a Sputnik crashing into the street? True, the actual event wasn't very alarming--nobody noticed for an hour and when they did they thought the hot object was some slag from a local foundry. I'm trying to imagine the reactions: "Hard hat area: falling spacecraft" or "Reinforced umbrellas for sale."

Odd that I should only learn about this from a BBC article about a claim that one crashed in Scotland too. Next time we go through Manitowoc we'll have to go look.