The Astrodome opened on April 9, 1965, as the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned multi-purpose stadium ever built. Engineers could not keep natural grass alive without sunlight, so they replaced the grass with an artificial playing surface — the first of its kind in major sports. The Astrodome sat 54,000, hosted rodeo, baseball, and football, and was promptly nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World — a phrase Houstonians apply with some pride and no shortage of irony. Houston has no zoning code, making it the only major American city where a refinery can sit next to a townhouse by right. That absence of zoning produced the sprawling, layered, improvised city that Houston is: some 670 square miles, the fourth-largest city in the United States, a port handling more foreign tonnage than any other in the country.
In September 1961 the federal government sited the new Manned Spacecraft Center twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Houston. From that moment, every American crewed mission to space was directed from Mission Control in Houston. On April 13, 1970, when the Apollo 13 oxygen tank ruptured 200,000 miles out, the call back to earth was “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” The Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20, 1969 had been acknowledged from the same building: “Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.” The first word spoken from the surface of the moon was Houston. That identity — Space City, Mission Control — is the one Houston carries globally above all others.
Why People Visit Houston Texas
Houston offers space heritage, Texas Revolution history, world-class museums, bayou parks, and one of the most diverse food scenes in the country. Visitors come for Mission Control and the San Jacinto battleground, the museum district and the bayou trails, the rodeo in March, and the simple scale of a city that runs from downtown skyline to ship channel to Gulf Coast. It is sprawling, layered, and unlike anywhere else in America.
