The team mascot for the Houston Astros is Orbit, a furry green spaceman with orange antennas and nose (matching the orange of his Astros baseball cap). Orbit is on his second tour of duty with the Astros. He was the team mascot from 1990 to 1999 but was replaced by Junction Jack. He returned in the postseason on November 2, 2012, to be the Astros mascot starting again in the 2013 season.
Orbit entertains at Astro home games and is active in the community as well, especially with children. He is also, perhaps, the most supportive (aggressively so) of team mascots. For example, he was ejected from an Astros game for arguing balls and strikes with umpire Gary Darling.
Orbit is a tribute to Houston as “Space City” as it is the home of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. His exact design is taken from the more than 10,000 children’s drawings submitted in a design completion.
The Junction Jack period occurred from 2000 to 2012 when the Astros moved to a new stadium on the site a historic railway station. However, fans remembered Orbit and when the Astros moved to the American League West in 2013 (after 51 seasons in the National League), Orbit was the team mascot again. Orbit is especially proud that shortly after his return, the Astros were World Series Champs in 2017!
Orbit likes to brag (to other mascots) that his team is the only one in major league baseball to have won a pennant in both the National League and the American League. In 2005 the Astros played in the world series against the Chicago White Sox and lost (while Chicago broke the “black sox” curse of more than 80 years). Then, in the American League in 2017, the Astros took on and beat the Los Angeles Dodgers who, unfortunately, did not have a mascot!