The Deke Slayton Memorial Space & Bicycle Museum in Sparta, Wisconsin, takes an unlikely route through history: from bicycles to airplanes to outer space. The museum celebrates Sparta native Deke Slayton, one of NASA’s original Mercury 7 astronauts and a member of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, while exploring how bicycle technology helped pave the way for aviation. Its collection includes more than 70 bicycles spanning the evolution of the bicycle, two full-size airplanes, NASA artifacts, and a piece of fabric from the Wright Flyer that traveled to the moon with Neil Armstrong.
The real showstopper is a piece of moon rock returned to Earth by Apollo 16, making the Deke Slayton Museum home to what it identifies as Wisconsin’s only viewable piece of moon rock. Other exhibits follow the development of aviation and Slayton’s career, including his Formula 1 racing plane, the Stinger, and a 1932 Pietenpol airplane. The museum is on the second floor of Sparta’s historic 1923 Masonic Temple, part of the city’s “Historic Four Corners,” where all four corner buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a particularly good stop for anyone interested in space history, unusual museums, aviation, bicycles, or the history behind Sparta’s claim as the “Bicycling Capital of America.”
