Organ, New Mexico: Space Murals Museum

Artwork on an outdoor water tank chronicles the history of the U.S. space program. Inside, displays include a model of the forgotten Space Station Freedom.

Museum is open and is free with donation suggested. As mentioned, the only real mural is the large tank outside but inside still has a nice collection of mostly photos and patches. It's easy to tell how much the late founder of the museum loved NASA and space exploration.

There's really only one mural at the Space Murals Museum, and it stretches around the outside of a circular 1.2 million gallon outdoor water tank. Colorful artwork chronicles the history of the U.S. space program from the 1950s to the 1986 Challenger explosion, at which point we assume the artist ran out of room.

Surrounding the tank are outdoor displays such as the tail from a Nazi V-2 rocket, a Nike Hercules Missile, a one-eighth scale model of the Challenger, and a unique Space Shuttle-shaped pond filled with Koi fish.

The indoor displays skew heavily toward photos, but there is a large model of "Space Station Freedom" and a pair of dusty astronaut boots, although the jury's still out on whether that dust really came back from the Moon or not.