54The Building With a Spacecraft in the Lobby

Start here, because nothing else in Waco prepares you for it. On the outside, three murals on a brand-new building: a launch going up through a purple sky with circuit traces running out of the exhaust; two enormous hands conducting an orchestra nobody can see, with a monarch butterfly resting on the baton and falling binary code behind them; and around the corner, the music itself, notes drifting off the wall. They were painted for Creative Waco by Michelle Wilson, who signs her walls @MichisWorldofCHAOS_art, and her collaborator, who signs @FemArtTx. Go back after dark if you can: parts of the constellations in the launch mural only show up under blacklight.

The third mural is around the side and it is the one to hunt for. A great blue heron comes in low over a painted river with a school of sharpnose shiners under it — a little endangered Brazos minnow, painted at the scale of a thing that matters. Behind the bird, floating in the water like they sank there, are periodic-table tiles. One of them reads Rf · 104 · Rutherfordium · 267. That is not decoration. Dr. James Andrew Harris was born in Waco in 1932, ran the Heavy Isotopes Production Group at Lawrence Berkeley, and is co-credited with the discovery of elements 104 and 105. Somebody painted his element into a river on the side of a community centre in his home town, four blocks from where he grew up, and did not label it.

Then go through the door — it is free, it has always been free — and look up. Hanging over the lobby is a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. Not a model. Not a mock-up. This capsule flew three resupply missions to the International Space Station — CRS-10, CRS-16 and CRS-20 — and the placard beside it does the arithmetic: 98 days on orbit, 88 of them berthed to the station. CRS-20 was its last flight. Twenty-three feet tall, twelve across, and one end of it is the colour of a burnt marshmallow, because that end came home through the atmosphere. SpaceX has been testing rocket engines at McGregor, twenty miles down the road, since 2003, and when the city built this $13.7 million STEAM center on the old Bledsoe-Miller Community Center site, SpaceX gave Waco a spacecraft to put in the window.

The building opened in January 2026 and it is named for two Wacoans: Jules Bledsoe, who sang the role of Joe in the Broadway premiere of Show Boat in 1927, and Doris Miller, whose memorial you will reach in about four minutes. Eight more murals inside, by Vincent Thomas and Tneyah Thomas, put both of them on the walls along with Dr. Vivienne Malone-Mayes — refused admission to Baylor because she was Black, went and took her mathematics doctorate at UT Austin instead, then came back and became Baylor's first African American faculty member — and Dr. James Andrew Harris, the Waco-born chemist whose team helped make two elements that had never existed before.

Park here. The STEAM Center has free public parking on both sides and the entrance faces the playground, right by the shuttle mural — it is the trailhead for this whole walk. Admission is free; the building is open 10–8 Monday to Wednesday and 10–6 Thursday to Saturday, and closed on Sunday, so if you want to see the spacecraft, come while it is open. The park itself is open 6 a.m. to midnight, and the restrooms are here.