Spaceship Earth is Future World's landmark adventure. Dramatic new scenes in the attraction and its post show depict life in the 21st century's Global Neighborhood. With all-new narration by actor Jeremy Irons and an impressive new musical score, guests experience a time-travel journey from the beginning of time to the electronic age. Spaceship Earth, the visual and thematic centerpiece of Epcot, weighs 16 million pounds -- more than three times that of a Space Shuttle fully fueled and ready for launch. The outer skin of Spaceship Earth is made up of 11,324 aluminum and plastic-alloy triangles. Also, did you know that rainwater never falls off the sphere? It’s absorbed into the ball and funneled away

The attraction is Future World’s landmark adventure.

As guests soar through time and space within the famed 180-foot silver geosphere, they see innovative, interactive television and digital communications at work -- bringing life-saving medical technology to wilderness homes, helping archaeologists share distant discoveries with home base instantly or creating electronic bridges that close gaps in human understanding.

In one scene an American boy and a Japanese teen-age girl exchange experiences via video telephone. He shows today’s karate class; she shows video of her home run in last night’s baseball game. With narration featuring the powerful voice of actor Jeremy Irons and an impressive new musical score, the Spaceship Earth production includes dazzling visual effects; floating images of current newscasts on giant screen, super-definition TV; “virtual reality” classrooms of the future; and a breathtaking planetarium visualization of the universe around the “Earth.”

Larry Gertz, show producer for the new production, said major changes were made to humanize the story of communications and to provide a complete storyline with a beginning, middle and end, tracing man’s ability to overcome distance and language barriers through improved communication concepts and new technologies.

First acts of the drama trace development of language and literature from caveman days through Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations to the Renaissance, printing press and industrial and electronic age communication.

Familiar scenes starring Audio-Animatronics® actors have been enhanced with fiber-optic visual effects, new lighting and sound, plus an improved ride system that reduces vehicle noise during the sharp ascent and the precipitous plunge through the new Act III where images seem to float in space.

At the end of the 14-minute journey through time, invites guests to sample its Global Neighborhood in an interactive computer-video wonderland. The post-show area includes:

• Interactive Wonderland -- guests explore the information highway with Alice and the Cheshire Cat -- video shopping, movies-on-demand and film critic reviews, or viewer-choice sporting event broadcasts and the camera angles for viewing them.
• Communications Breakthrough -- a video-telephone game played against other guests where players are challenged to knock glass bricks from a computer-graphic wall with electronic “paddles” to build a communications link with other participants.
• What’s in a Word -- guests translate humorous idioms from one language to another, demonstrating the difficulty and potential of electronic translation.
• Electronic Finger Paint, Portrait Puzzle and Color Match -- three games illustrating communications which do not depend on language.
• Story Teller Phones -- guests can phone friends or relatives and choose appropriate sound effects from a video wall to “fool” friends into thinking they are calling from a jungle, a haunted house or a cartoon world.

Spaceship Earth’s 16-million-pound, 180-foot-high geosphere has been recognized as Future World’s dominant landmark since the opening of Epcot in 1982. The attraction helps introduce and complements Innoventions, Epcot’s ever-changing exposition of amazing products for the near future.