Known by many Orlando visitors as the “Giant Golf Ball,” Spaceship Earth is to EPCOT Center what Cinderella’s Castle is to the Magic Kingdom. This geosphere has become the symbol of the theme park and is easily the most photographed structure at EPCOT Center.

The voice of actor Jeremy Irons is your guide on this easy-paced ride where guests experience the history of communication from the earliest days of cavemen to a future yet to come. Spaceship Earth utilizes a modification of Disney’s “Omnimover” system that allows guests to load and unload continuously with no ride stoppage. Your seats automatically recline as you make your way upward and view the Audio-animatronic scenes that depict different eras including the Egyptians and hieroglyphics, the ancient Phoenicians as they invent the alphabet and even the Gutenberg printing press.

As you crest the top of Spaceship Earth, you leave the past and see a wondrous display of stars and planets in the “sky.” The present and future are then presented as your seats turn around and recline once again, this time on a downward slope as you wind your way to the bottom of the sphere.

Did You Know?
 

• It didn’t take long for the future to catch up with the present. In fact, some of the “futuristic” gadgets depicted at Spaceship Earth were already in the pockets of some of the visitors who experienced this ride during their Orlando vacation. In 1994 the ride’s host voice was changed from Walter Cronkite’s to Jeremy Irons’ and Spaceship Earth underwent a makeover. (Some Orlando vacation regulars may recall that Walter Cronkite was not the original voice for this ride, either. The first four years of this attraction featured the voice of Vic Perrin, best known as the voice on “The Outer Limits” TV show). More Audio-animatronics were added, a new “future” was created and the ending song was changed from “Tomorrow’s Child” to an instrumental piece.
  
  
• Lines for Spaceship Earth can get incredibly long, since it is the first thing Orlando vacationers visiting EPCOT Center see when they enter the park. If the line to get in is more than twenty minutes, wait until later in the day to see this incredibly popular attraction, when queues are practically nonexistent.
   
• Disney employs the use of “Smelitizers” on Spaceship Earth that produce a faint odor accompanying various scenes. It is most apparent when guests experience the scent of burning wood while viewing the Roman ruins segment of the ride.
   
• The Disney engineers had to come up with a way to prevent guests underneath of Spaceship Earth from getting deluged by water running off of the giant geosphere during the rain storms that sometimes spring up seemingly from out of nowhere, in Orlando. The 11,324 individual triangles that make up the outer sphere actually collect the water which is then channeled into the World Showcase Lagoon.
   
• Spaceship Earth is 165 feet in diameter and weighs 16 million pounds. It takes up 2.2 million cubic feet of space and has an outside surface diameter of 150,000 square feet. The six support legs that support this enormous attraction are sunk over 100 feet into the ground. If Spaceship Earth truly was a “giant golf ball,” the golfer hitting it would be over one mile tall. I guess the entire State of Florida would be the golf course!
  
  
• Illuminating the top portion of a spherical structure as tall as Spaceship Earth presented another engineering challenge. Rather than mount lights on incredibly tall poles to illuminate the top side of the ball, Disney architects decided to come up with a three-dimensional lighting effect. The bottom-most portion of the ball is illuminated with purple lights that gradually fade into a light shade of blue. The blue hue turns progressively darker as it climbs toward the top of the ball, eventually fading into a black that blends in with the nighttime sky.
   
• Attention to detail is perhaps Disney’s greatest trait and Spaceship Earth is no exception in that regard. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Roman graffiti, the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, and the Gutenberg Bible are all reproductions of authentic items. The Greek actors are performing a scene from "Oedipus Rex" and the telegraph operator is sending a message about the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The conveyor system used to send paint up to Michelangelo is an exact replica, as well.
   
• Ray Bradbury was the most prominent advisor employed to create the story line for the future portion of Spaceship Earth.