Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: Hyperspace Mountain sits inside a steel-and-rivet dome in Discoveryland at Disneyland Paris, and almost none of it should exist. When the park opened in 1992, this corner of the resort was a field of financial anxiety. Attendance fell short of projections, hotel rooms sat empty, and the company was losing millions of French francs every year. A spectacular new attraction was desperately needed. What opened on the 1st of June 1995 was a $89.7 million indoor roller coaster unlike anything else Disney had ever built. It is the only Space Mountain on earth to feature inversions. It is the only one with a section of track that exits the building entirely. It launched riders from zero to 44 mph in under two seconds. And it began its life not as a Star Wars ride, or even a space ride in any conventional sense, but as a tribute to a French novelist who had been dead for ninety years. How a financially failing theme park commissioned one of the most technically ambitious roller coasters ever built, and how that ride reinvented itself three times without changing a single metre of its track, is a story rooted in Jules Verne, Victorian steam, and the peculiar pressures of bringing Disney to Europe.

• 2. Discovery Mountain's Grand Ambition

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  The original blueprint for the building that would become Hyperspace Mountain was staggering in scope. Disney's Imagineers initially planned a structure 100 metres in diameter, a kind of indoor theme park within the theme park. The scheme bore the working title Discovery Mountain, and the list of planned features reads like a wish list from a theme park designer with an unlimited budget. A large submarine called the Nautilus was to be housed inside. An underwater restaurant with a Nautilus theme would sit beside it. A copy of EPCOT's Horizons attraction was earmarked for the space. A stop for the Disneyland Railroad was drawn into the plans. A free-fall ride themed to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth was on the list. Walkway tubes would link the building to CinéMagique and the Videopolis dining and stage complex.

  None of it survived the budget review. The resort's first three years had produced losses measured in millions of French francs, driven by low hotel occupancy, low guest spending, and attendance dragged down by cold winters that Tokyo Disneyland, the comparison point in every planning meeting, simply did not have to endure. The building was shrunk from a 100-metre diameter to 61 metres. Nearly every planned element was cut. What remained was the Space Mountain roller coaster, now recast with a Victorian aesthetic and a Jules Verne theme, plus a walk-through Nautilus recreation nearby called Les Mystères du Nautilus.

  Imagineeer Tim Delaney shaped what the attraction became. Former Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner would later credit Delaney and Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune with saving Disneyland Paris from collapse.

• 3. Victorian Steel and the Columbiad

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  From the 1st of June 1995, riders entering the attraction encountered a world that felt borrowed from the workshops of the 19th century rather than the laboratories of the 20th. The queue, called the Stellar Way, was an open walkway through the mountain's interior where guests could watch occupied trains arc through their journey in real time. It led into the Victorian chambers of the Baltimore Gun Club, the fictional organisation from Verne's 1865 novel that built the Columbiad Cannon to fire a projectile at the moon. Drawings, plans, and blueprints lined the walls. Riders boarded copper-and-bronze vehicles called moontrains in a station decorated with hanging red, white, and blue flags and barrels of gunpowder stacked along the embarkation platforms.

  The launch itself was unlike anything else at any Disney park. The ride featured a 1.3G uphill catapult that pushed trains from rest to 44 mph in 1.8 seconds. Three inversions followed: a sidewinder, a corkscrew, and a cutback. The track briefly exited the building entirely before returning inside. In 1995, that configuration made it the first full-circuit launched roller coaster in the world.

  The ride also pioneered something that would spread to other parks: a Synchronized On-Board Audio Track, abbreviated SOBAT. Composer Steven Bramson wrote the original score, drawing inspiration from John Williams's film music and the score from the 1954 Disney film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The atmospheric music loop also wove in themes from films including Krull, The Rocketeer, Always, and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. SOBATs were later added to the Space Mountain attractions at Disneyland in California and Hong Kong Disneyland.

• 4. The Journey Inside the Mountain

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  Once launched, the narrative unfolded at 44 mph through a sequence of scenes that rewarded attentive riders. The trains shot through an asteroid field, narrowly missing a collision with one rock before encountering a larger threat: Colonel Impey Barbicane's Blue Moon Mining Company Machine, an industrial space device described as being built by the President of the Gun Club to extract mineral resources from asteroids. Riders weaved around it, passed through an asteroid's interior, and then climbed a lift hill toward a projection of the moon.

  That moon wore a smiling face, a direct reference to Georges Méliès's 1902 film adaptation of Verne's novel. On the left side of the track, a road sign on an asteroid read "To the Moon 50.000km". On the right, Jules Verne himself was depicted having landed on an adjacent asteroid, wearing appropriate equipment. The trains then arced back toward Earth through another asteroid field, surrounded by light effects simulating atmospheric re-entry heat, before passing through a machine called the Electro-de-Velocitor that slowed the vehicles back to station speed.

  The ride's success resonated beyond the queue lines. French guests, who had been publicly critical of Disneyland Paris for what many felt was an indifference to local culture, responded warmly to an attraction that treated Jules Verne as a founding hero rather than a footnote. The rollercoaster's financial impact matched its cultural one: after years of losses, Disneyland Paris recorded its first profits.

• 5. Mission 2 and the Silver Trains

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  Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune closed on the 15th of January 2005. When it reopened, the Victorian copper had been stripped away. The trains received a simple repaint from copper and bronze to silver. The Victorian Baltimore Gun Club chambers kept their architecture but now displayed plans for a journey to a supernova rather than the moon. The smiling Méliès moon was replaced by a supernova explosion. Neon lights at the ride's end were arranged to simulate a vortex called a "hypergate".

  The launch mechanism changed too. In the original version, trains were catapulted from about halfway up the cannon's incline. Mission 2 moved the launch point to the bottom of the cannon. The track itself stayed exactly as it had been since 1995; not a single section was altered.

  Michael Giacchino composed the new soundtrack. His score for Mission 2 followed the same model he used for Space Mountain attractions at Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland. Between January and July 2015, the ride received another round of improvements, including the addition of a single-rider queue and enhanced effects throughout the building. Mission 2's trains, upgraded during the Star Wars conversion, are expected to return if the attraction ever cycles back to that theme.

• 6. Star Wars Comes to Discoveryland

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  Space Mountain: Mission 2 closed on the 8th of January 2017 and reopened on the 7th of May 2017 as Star Wars: Hyperspace Mountain. The occasion was the resort's 25th Anniversary Celebration. New trains built by Vekoma arrived with shoulder vests instead of the previous restraint system. The change lowered the height requirement from 132 cm to 120 cm, making the ride accessible to more guests.

  The score was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, drawing on John Williams's Star Wars compositions. Inside the building, the Baltimore Gun Club chambers remained, reframed as the briefing room for a space mission using the Columbiad as a hyperspace launcher. Admiral Ackbar appears in the experience to issue the launch command. Upon reaching Jakku, TIE Fighters ambush the train before Blue Squadron fires on a Star Destroyer and strikes its bridge. A return jump through hyperspace brings riders back to the station.

  What is unusual about the attraction's full history is how much institutional continuity runs through every version. The Baltimore Gun Club chambers appear in all three incarnations. The Columbiad Cannon is present in every era, recast each time as the propulsion mechanism for whatever journey is currently underway. The 1995 track still carries every rider who boards the blue Vekoma trains today, and the Electro-de-Velocitor still performs its fictional duty of returning trains safely to the station.