Hold onto your vital organs: Epcot's long-awaited, simulation-savvy Mission: SPACE is ready for takeoff.
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published August 10, 2003
[Photo: courtesy Walt Disney World Resort]
The plaza entrance to Mission: SPACE features huge, eye-catching spheres that represent the Earth, its moon, Mars and Jupiter.
[Photo: Walt Disney Co.]
Riders on Mission: SPACE are told to work as a four-person team of astronauts when they step in a capsule such as this one and prepare for takeoff.
LAKE BUENA VISTA - We have a launch, but you might want to wait on lunch.
Parkgoers can lift off on the most-expensive ride ever created by the Walt Disney Co. this Friday, when Mission: SPACE opens in Epcot. The stomach-challenging flight to Mars will vie with Universal's Adventures of Spider-Man for the title of greatest indoor ride in the state.
Part of Mission: SPACE's certain success is due to its unusual make-it-happen gadgetry, which treats riders to four minutes and 20 seconds of life atop a high-tech pinball.
Utilizing expertise from former astronauts, NASA advisers and Jet Propulsion Lab workers, Disney's famed Imagineers have spent more than five years and $100-million fashioning a simulator ride whose moving images showing on monitors in front of each rider match bursts of motion supplied by a centrifuge.
Thus, when your rocket blasts off, has to dodge asteroids and endures a rough landing on the Red Planet, you actually are experiencing increased G forces. Some riders say they could feel their cheeks "flapping" during these brief bursts of motion. One person riding with me said she felt nauseous.
The extra pushes of gravity are marvelously synchronized to the pictures on the monitors, as well as to a hokey narration by the ride's "capsule communicator" who, at various times orders riders to push instrument-panel buttons "now!" in order to avert disaster.
An industry first
Mission: SPACE is the latest of Walt Disney World Resort's science fiction-themed attractions. There is the legendary Space Mountain, kiddie-oriented Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, dull Spaceship Earth, bone-jarring Star Tours, scary ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter and old-think Astro Orbiter. Mission: SPACE surpasses the excitement quotient of all of them.
What's more, it apparently is unique.
"This ride has never been done, this use of a simulator," says Tim O'Brien, senior editor of the weekly trade journal Amusement Business.
O'Brien, an authority on theme parks, was also impressed by what is known in the trade as the "preshow," the effort to involve customers waiting to reach a ride or attraction with its story line.
Disney's planners "could have just put this ride in a big black dome and put some music to it, but that's not the Disney style," emphasized O'Brien. "Probably one-half to two-thirds of the cost of the package is beyond the box" that is the ride itself.
For Mission: SPACE, the preshow starts outdoors, in a wide plaza entrance dominated by huge globes that represent Jupiter, Mars, Earth and the moon. The first three are brilliantly colored while the moon is a dull gray, dotted with gold medallions denoting the locations where the 29 missions launched by the United States and the former Soviet Union have landed.
Once inside, the potential riders pass a series of signs warning them they will encounter loud noises, spinning and "enclosed spaces": The side entrance doors to each four-person "capsule" close; then the capsule's instrumentation panel and TV monitors move nearer to the riders after the restraint bars are lowered.
Shuffling along toward these capsules, the guests pass monitors showing video of predecessors enjoying the ride. They pass the actual ride-control monitoring rooms and walk underneath the final Lunar Rover built for use by Apollo mission astronauts (it's on loan from the Smithsonian Institution).
More impressive for its sheer size is a 35-foot rotating "gravity wheel," which was built for Disney's widely panned 2000 film Mission to Mars. A guesstimate at what space-station astronauts would use, this huge prop includes an exercise area, offices and sleeping cubicles.
Those with sharp eyes and memories may notice the center of the wheel carries the emblem of Horizons, the creaky time-travel attraction that opened on this site in 1983. It was demolished, and even the exterior walls of Mission: SPACE are new.
Elsewhere, rise and plummet
As riders move through the preshow, Gary Sinise, who starred in Mission to Mars, pops up on screens to explain that Disney employees now are going to assign the riders to various jobs within the capsule.
The ride's creators should have saved a few thousand dollars on the gizmos and put it toward the costumes for these employees. They are garbed in unintentionally laughable outfits that resemble a cross between TV's Power Rangers and McDonald's employees, circa 1965.
But that's the only notable flaw in this thrilling ride. Anticipating possible complaints that accommodating 160 riders at a time will not be enough to satisfy the hordes of would-be astronauts, this ride opens with Disney World's FASTPASS feature, which assigns specific ride times to those who want to return for a later lift-off.
If parkgoers want another jolt of thrills, they can take the park's buses from Epcot to Disney-MGM Studios and hoof over to the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.
Originally opened in 1994 and retuned to add more excitement a couple of years later, this is an indoor ride that takes you to the top of a 13-story haunted hotel in an "elevator" that has preprogrammed problems.
The ride was the first, O'Brien noted, to be built so that it could be changed to add or decrease the thrill factor. Early this year, the Tower's computers were reprogrammed, for the third time, to offer dozens of variations on the basic experience:
The story line is that the hotel is haunted; riders get a dose of the memorable opening sequence of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV series after they are seated in their hotel elevator. Ghostly figures appear and vanish until the riders are whisked upward in a darkened shaft. Suddenly, their elevator plummets. Rather than a free-fall, the elevators are actually forced downward by machines so that the fall is more rapid than gravity alone would accomplish.
Just as unexpectedly, the elevator resumes its climb, but then drops again, and perhaps again, and again. Usually the elevator car climbs high enough to let the riders look out an opening in the shaft to see the theme park - comforting reassurance before the car plummets.
The computer programs change the combination of rises and falls each time an individual elevator begins its climb, so that riders cannot rely on their memories to warn them when to brace for any drops. The time on the elevator lasts about five minutes, though the rapid ups and downs are a small fraction of that time.
Although the Tower, Epcot's Test Track (tracked cars propel passengers up to 65 mph) and Mission: SPACE have added real thrills to the sprawling Disney parks, each attraction was so long in the development that they were not created as a way to draw customers from the shriek shrine that is Universal's Islands of Adventure.
As O'Brien puts it, "I don't think anyone at Disney decided, "We have to keep up with Universal.' Disney is competing with itself," continually to draw repeat visitors.
As for Universal, it has recently announced the opening for next spring or summer of its latest ride, based on the two recent Mummy movies. This ride will combine actual motion, computer-generated movies and other factors to create multiple sensations, a la the Spider-Man ride.
This new venture is touted by Universal spokesman Tom Schroeder as "an immersive experience with an edge . . . a psychological thriller."
Which would give thrill-seekers their choice of high-tech venues: outer space or Egypt's desert.
If you go:
Mission: SPACE is adjacent to Test Track, at Epcot. Facing the landmark SPACESHIP EARTH dome at the park entrance, Mission: SPACE is to the left, about halfway around the big globe and past the Wonders of Life pavilion.
