Disney Announced a Spaceship Earth Reimagining at D23 and Did Not Give a Closing Date, Six Years After Shelving the Last One
Spaceship Earth is being reimagined. That is very nearly the whole of what Disney committed to at D23 on Saturday, and the gap between the size of that news and the size of the detail behind it is the story.
Imagineer Ali Rubinstein delivered the announcement during Horizons: A Carousel of Progress, the Disney Experiences showcase, appearing alongside host Neil Patrick Harris and former NASA engineer Mark Rober. Rubinstein said a re-imagineered Spaceship Earth is coming to EPCOT, bringing the attraction into the internet age and beyond.
The one substantive change Disney described is thematic. Spaceship Earth currently tells the story of human communication, tracing it from cave paintings through the printing press to the computer age. The reimagined version widens that to human connection.
Quick facts: Spaceship Earth opened with EPCOT Center on October 1, 1982 and stands 180 feet tall. It has had four narrators, most recently Judi Dench, who took over when the attraction reopened in February 2008. Disney has announced no closing date, no reopening date and no reopening year for the new project.
What Disney did not say
Close to everything a planner would need. There is no closing date, no reopening window and no indication of how much of the ride actually changes. Disney released no concept art alongside the announcement, which is unusual for a project it thought was worth a D23 stage. It did not say who narrates, whether the score changes, or whether the descent, the stretch rebuilt in the last overhaul, survives this one.
Disney announced this once before
This is the second time Disney has told a D23 audience that Spaceship Earth is being reimagined. At the 2019 D23 Expo it announced Spaceship Earth: Our Shared Story, a version guided by a magical story light, with new narration, a new score and new scenes. That project had a hard date attached: the attraction was scheduled to close on May 26, 2020.
It never closed. Walt Disney World shut down in March 2020 for the pandemic, and when the parks came back that July the Spaceship Earth overhaul was among the capital projects shelved indefinitely. Six years later Disney is on the same stage making the same promise, and this time there is no date attached at all.
That history is the reason to hold this one loosely. An announcement without a closing date is not a schedule, and Disney has already shown that a Spaceship Earth reimagining with a closing date can still evaporate.
What it means for a trip
Nothing yet, and that is the practical takeaway. Spaceship Earth is EPCOT's icon and one of its highest capacity attractions, and it soaks up an enormous share of guest traffic in the first hour of the day. Whenever the closure does land it will not be a short one, because the last overhaul took the ride down from July 2007 until February 2008. Until Disney names a window there is nothing to plan around and no reason to move a trip.
One more thing worth noting alongside this. Spaceship Earth has run without a presenting sponsor since Siemens ended its Disney alliance in October 2017, and sponsorship money paid for the attraction's last overhaul. Disney did not mention a partner on Saturday.
Source: Disney Parks Blog.
