Short answers, pulled from the story.
Star Tours opened at Disneyland on the 9th of January 1987. To mark the occasion, Disneyland remained open for a 60-hour marathon from 10 a.m. on January 9th to 10 p.m. on January 11th, and many guests arrived dressed as Star Wars characters.
Star Tours had a final construction cost of $32 million. Disney Imagineers purchased four military-grade flight simulators at $500,000 each as part of that budget.
Paul Reubens voiced Captain RX-24, known as Rex, the droid pilot of the StarSpeeder 3000. Reubens credited his earlier role voicing a shipboard computer named Max in the Disney film Flight of the Navigator, listed under the pseudonym Paul Mall, as the reason he was cast.
The simulator system was patented as the Advanced Technology Leisure Application Simulator, or ATLAS. It was originally designed by Rediffusion Simulation in Sussex, England, and used hydraulic motion base cabins with six degrees of freedom capable of moving 35 degrees in the X-Y-Z plane.
Star Tours closed at Disney's Hollywood Studios and Disneyland in 2010 to allow conversion to the successor attraction, Star Tours - The Adventures Continue. The final public event for Celebration V attendees was held on the 14th of August 2010, and the last ride exclusive to D23 members ran on the 7th of September 2010.
The Star Tours concept began as a proposed interactive simulator ride based on the 1979 Disney film The Black Hole. That project was shelved because of high costs and the film's poor reception. Disney then applied the simulator idea to Star Wars through its existing creative partnership with George Lucas, which had begun with the opening of Captain EO in 1986.