Space Station X-1 opened at Disneyland on its opening day of July 17th, 1955. When the park opened, Tomorrowland was nowhere near completed, with only a few attractions for guests to enjoy scattered throughout the land. The idea behind the attraction was that guests would be able to have the illusion of being in a space station that was orbiting around the earth.
While this seems like a pretty cool idea, it was a lot less exciting than one would think. The illusion was actually just a painting created by Claude Coats and Peter Ellenshaw because when the attraction was created, there was still no satellite image of the earth that was available for people to use. The attraction worked really well as a temporary attraction, somehow managing to stick around for nearly five years until February 17th, 1960. It’s amazing that it even stayed around for that long considering that Rocket to the Moon was already open by then, so Space Station X-1 must have seemed really underwhelming in comparison.
However, it’s not time to move out of the past quite yet as we look back at an attraction that tried to celebrate the past while in the land of tomorrow.
While this seems like a pretty cool idea, it was a lot less exciting than one would think. The illusion was actually just a painting created by Claude Coats and Peter Ellenshaw because when the attraction was created, there was still no satellite image of the earth that was available for people to use. The attraction worked really well as a temporary attraction, somehow managing to stick around for nearly five years until February 17th, 1960. It’s amazing that it even stayed around for that long considering that Rocket to the Moon was already open by then, so Space Station X-1 must have seemed really underwhelming in comparison.
However, it’s not time to move out of the past quite yet as we look back at an attraction that tried to celebrate the past while in the land of tomorrow.
Citation