Bonne Terre, Missouri: Space Museum and Gus Grissom Center

The personal collection of space-fan Earl Mullins, augmented with official NASA relics. Featured exhibits include one of Gus Grissom's astronaut suits, and an Apollo 16 moon rock.

The Bonne Terre Space Museum is a small building jam-packed with space memorabilia; from newspaper clippings to tubes of space food. The curator said they have three times more stuff than they can display.

The best part was he let you handle some of the exhibits, like a burned astronaut glove and a sixteen pound bolt from the hatch of one of the space capsules.

Touted as the "largest privately held collection of space memorabilia and artifacts in the state of Missouri," the museum had its Grand Opening on June 24, 2006. Earl Mullins, 54, is the collector, a certified space nut since he was a child. His collection includes space food, space toiletries, props from television programs, a prototype of a Mercury capsule, and a Soviet cosmonaut suit. There are also rare space toys, vintage magazines and photos. One of Earl's treasures is an American flag that went to the moon and back on an Apollo mission in 1972. He has plenty more (though some of the collection was lost in a theft in 2003, when he originally planned to open the museum).