Disney has a new ride in Orlando that they claim is the most technically advanced they’ve ever done–a simulated mission to Mars.

…what makes Epcot’s Mission: SPACE centrifuge truly unique is that it’s not like a carnival ride version of a centrifuge — such as the Gravitron — where you’re “simply strapped in” and whirled around for a few moments in the open air.

Instead, you and three others ride inside what amounts to a full flight simulator — Disney calls them capsules — complete with individual monitors, control sticks to move and buttons to push.

“We’ve taken that centrifuge technology and modified it, if you will, for an entertainment attraction. We’ve added layers of audio, video, lighting and special effects to create sort of an immersive experience that helps support and tell our story,” said Mike Lentz, the Disney Imagineer who served as executive director for Mission: SPACE.

Sounds pretty cool. They’ve had a “Mission To Mars” ride in the past (that was an update on the original “Rocket To The Moon” that was part of the original Disneyland), but this sounds much more individualized, high fidelity, and upgradeable.

However, I have mixed feelings about it.

“We have worked for a long time about doing ‘space’ at Epcot because it’s just such a natural fit with what we’re about here,” said Brad Rex, Disney’s vice president in charge of Epcot. “This is a tribute to NASA and the space program.”

Sponsored by HP, the attraction was designed with the full support of the space agency and is believed to have cost Disney more than $100 million to develop and construct…

…NASA has cooperated with the development of Mission: SPACE at every step of the way. For example, solid hydrogen fuel, aerospike rocket engines and hypersleep all are technologies mentioned in Mission: SPACE, and all are being pursued in some way by the space agency, officials said.

“They’ve really done a very credible job at making this as strongly tied to reality as they can,” said David Lavery, program executive for solar system exploration at NASA Headquarters. “These are all realistic concepts that we’re pursuing in some of our advanced research and development efforts right now.”

But the big draw for NASA in working with Disney was the opportunity for educational outreach, as well as just simple inspiration.

“Part of our vision is to reach out and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, technologists and astronauts — and this is really a nice overlap between that part of NASA’s mission and what Disney is trying to do,” Lavery said.

My problem is that this perpetuates the heroic historical NASA myth–that only massive government bureaucracies will get us to Mars, that the only way to participate in space is to be a scientist, or engineer, or technologist, or “astronaut,” that the only reason people would go to Mars is to “explore” and “do science,” that this is what NASA would be doing, dammit, if we just had some politicians with vision!

Despite their proud proclamation of “tying it to reality,” I get no sense of any realistic vision of the future at all–it’s just using updated technology to promote the same socialistic utopias of the past that Disney has always promoted. We just don’t realize it because we don’t recognize it, partly due to similar propaganda put out unendingly by Disney and others for the past half century (the original Colliers pieces with von Braun were in 1953, I believe). Which is pretty ironic, considering that this is being sponsored by a mostly private-enterprise company, Hewlett-Packard. Which just shows that they don’t get it either.

While it’s nice that they worked with NASA on some of the technical aspects, it would have been nice if HP and Disney had consulted with someone besides NASA on the even more important social, business and cultural ones. Of course, the fact that they didn’t sums up in a nutshell why it’s been thirty years since the last time a human walked on another world.