Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth is EPCOT’s iconic structure & the first ride that you see after entering the park. It is an 18-storey tall, Geodesic Sphere which contains a time-travel themed ride showing how advances in communication have helped to shape today & the future.

The structure is nicknamed the ‘golf ball’, due to its similarity in appearance, but geometrically is actually a Pentakis Dodecahedron (made up from 11,520 Isosceles triangles, if it were a true sphere with interruptions due to doors and supports). Being a Water Engineer, I thought it was really cool how the sphere is drained by 1-inch gaps in the cladding (that you cant really see) which direct rainwater to a drainage system discharging to the World Showcase Lagoon. This prevents rainwater from pouring off the structure (& it really rains in Florida, so capturing all the water is pretty impressive).

When you enter the ‘golf ball’ you step on to a revolving platform which moves in time with the ride cars so that you can easily step into the cars (this method of embarking/disembarking is used for most of the Disney ‘ride’ attractions). As you make your way up through the structure, there are a number of animatronics scenes depicting communication through the ages (e.g., Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, the first printing press, & the first message using the Internet). I have been to Disneyworld twice previously, & every time I have been on this ride it has been slightly different. There were now touch screens in front of each passenger in the car which were used towards the end of the ride when you inputted your choice for how you would like your future to be. A video was then played with your choices & your face superimposed on the character in the video – cool. Even cooler was that when you got off the ride there was a massive video screen in the after-ride activity area showing the world & you were shown on the screen depending upon where you said that you were from during the ride.

There were some other pretty cool attractions after the ride. Beth & I both had a go at a racing game before playing a game where you had to move ‘power pills’ into areas that needed power. This might not sound that interesting, but the game was motion controlled. It was projected onto the floor where you used metal detector shaped sticks to push the power pills around into areas needing the energy. Cheryl & Beth then played a game where you had to transform a talking skeleton into a ‘human’. This was done using a joystick to select the appropriate body part & then to control a crane which you used to lift each part into the correct position. Nothing out of the ordinary there except that the game was a ‘virtual reality’ style simulation on screen in full colour 3-D!