This article was first released on MousePlanet.com on July 6, 2005, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of MousePlanet.
After the success of Matterhorn Mountain, the first steel-pipe coaster, Walt Disney is said to have asked, “Why can’t we have a ‘space mountain’ ride?” So in the mid-1960s, Walt gave John Hench the assignment to design a space mountain. (This “odd” name wasn’t set until much later—it was called Space Venture for a period until a vote was taken among WED employees to choose between Space Mountain and other names that had been suggested. Bumper stickers with “Ski Space Mountain” abounded.) [...]
