Putting up a post about speculative, futuristic baseball stadiums reminded me of two facts about the building of the Houston Astrodome during the 1960s:

1. At the 1962 groundbreaking ceremony of what was then called the Harris County Domed Stadium, civic leaders and local pols didn’t dig shovels into the ground but instead fired blanks from Colt .45 revolvers into the soil. (The Houston Astros were originally called the Colt .45s.)
2. In preparing for the opening the stadium in 1965, the grounds crew vacuumed the field while dressed in spacesuits. 

It was a strange pair of christenings, marked first by the technology of the past and then of the future.