Houston's baseball team became the Astros, and its new stadium the Astrodome, because of the space center at Clear Lake. The club had played its first three seasons as the Colt .45s. On 1 December 1964 it announced the change to Astros, a name that reflected Houston's role in the space program, and the Harris County Domed Stadium, opening the next spring, became known as the Astrodome. According to the Society for American Baseball Research, there were practical reasons too. The Colt firearms company wanted royalties on team merchandise carrying its name, and the club's driving force, Roy Hofheinz, felt the old name said more about the region's past than its future. Hofheinz and his partner Bob Smith debated Stars or Astros, Stardome or Astrodome, and Smith chose Astrodome. Of the stadium's official name, Hofheinz said he could not sell it and needed something he could.
The astronauts came to the opening. Twenty-one of them attended the exhibition game against the Yankees on 9 April 1965, alongside President Johnson. At the first regular-season game on 12 April, 24 of NASA's 28 astronauts were introduced to the crowd, and each was given a lifetime pass to baseball in the dome.
Houston had been calling itself Space City since at least 1962, when a street map printed for the Chamber of Commerce carried the title "Houston, space city, U.S.A." The Astros moved downtown in 2000. The Astrodome has been closed to the public since 2009; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014 and made a State Antiquities Landmark in 2017.
Getting there
29.6850, -95.4078
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