The experience: Simulating a blastoff into the atmosphere

The trick: centrifuge-based movements to mimic acceleration

One of the weirdest parts of Mission: SPACE is that it’s a ride that few people understand. Since you effectively enter a small cabin and never see outside again until after the ride ends, you have no way of knowing how that it works. Amusingly, this attraction is one of the easiest Disney creations to visualize.

Remember when you were a kid and would go to the carnival? You know that Scrambler ride that lifts you up off the ground and whirls you around in a circle just long enough for you to empty the contents of your stomach? In a nutshell, that’s Mission: SPACE.

The technology is understandably more complex, but the premise is similar. When you approach your "space capsule," you're entering a room with 10 of these rooms. They're the ride carts, and they're attached to an arm that is, in turn, attached to the spinner.

Just like with the carnival ride, the start of Mission: SPACE includes a moment when the floor gets pulled out from under your capsule. You’re now spinning, although Imagineers added more complex movements than that. You’re capable of pivoting and circular rotations. These motions allow the rider to feel experiences like rotating backward in preparation of flight launch or avoiding collisions in an asteroid belt.

The true heft of the Mission: SPACE experience stems from the centrifuge. It’s the spinner that provides the authentic outer space sensations. And it’s also the source of all the nightmarish health issues that people have had over the years. Disney’s quest for realism did them no favors here, as their centrifuge thrust guests into the atmosphere at almost 3 G’s of force. Each space capsule spins between 30 and 35 miles per hour. The human body simply is not conditioned for that sort of violence, as we’re not accustomed to it.

Image: DisneyWhat Disney learned through a few tragedies was that the centrifuge element overwhelmed the senses of some riders. Park officials were forced to shut the attraction down for a time and add a second version.  It delivered the same story and ride experience except for the physicality of the centrifuge. The Orange version maintained the roughness of 2.5 G’s of pressure. Think of it as Classic Mission: SPACE. 

Imagineers introduced the new “Green” Mission: SPACE ride in 2006. The calmer iteration disconnected the centrifuge while leaving in the other spinning and pivoting elements. It’s still not a gentle ride, but nobody blacks out from the milder version of Mission: SPACE. The flaw with it is that the Green ride had no identity of its own for more than a decade. In a moment, we'll learn how Imagineers finally addressed that in 2017.