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| At the entrance; getting down low in the flowers helps hide the crowd. |
We never tire of taking pictures of Spaceship Earth at Walt Disney World’s Epcot. We’ve probably collected hundreds of pictures of this Disney icon over the years, but we added these pictures to our collection just last week when we had the opportunity to spend a day at Epcot while visiting family and house hunting in central Florida.
You can almost tell the people who’ve been to Epcot dozens of times like us: the majority of them breeze on past this giant sphere on their way to their ride of choice. Even though we’ve seen “the big golf ball” (as we, and so many other people, have nicknamed it) dozens of times ourselves, we behave more like the people who’ve never seen this architectural wonder (in person) before: we pause for lots of pictures, including obligatory selfies with the big ball as the backdrop.
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| From across World Showcase Lagoon; gives Spaceship Earth some perspective. |
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| The colors at night are simply cool; you don’t even have to see the entire sphere for the picture to be great. |
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| The night colors and this angle shows off the geodesic patterns. |
Spaceship Earth is a complete geodesic sphere: you can stand directly beneath it, and in fact you will stand directly under it if you take the ride it houses. It is, in fact, a building housing the ride, which means Spaceship Earth is some of the most interesting architecture you’ll ever see. It was designed by Disney Imagineers with the help of Ray Bradbury and Buckminster Fuller, the original developer of the geodesic pattern of triangles that make up the sphere and geodesic domes around the world.
The ride within Spaceship Earth is one of the original EPCOT Center rides, though it’s been updated through the years. For many of those years, it was famously narrated by Walter Cronkite, but did you know that Cronkite was not the original narrator for Spaceship Earth? The original narration was performed by Lawrence Dobkin from when EPCOT Center opened in 1982 until 1986 when the ride was updated and his voice was replaced with Walter Cronkite’s.
“For eons, our planet has drifted as a spaceship through the universe…”
