Space Mountain: Mission 2
| Space Mountain: Mission 2 | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disneyland Park (Paris) |
| Land / area | Discoveryland |
| Type | Steel launched roller coaster |
| Opened | April 9, 2005 |
| Closed | January 8, 2017 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering, Werner Stengel
|
| Status | Closed |
Space Mountain: Mission 2 was the second version of the Space Mountain roller coaster in Discoveryland at Disneyland Park (Paris), operating from April 9, 2005 to January 8, 2017. Where the original ride, Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune, had retold Jules Verne's voyage to the Moon in Victorian steampunk style, Mission 2 kept the same track, cannon and mountain but sent riders beyond the Moon to the edge of the universe, with a new score, new effects and a longer, harder launch. It was succeeded in 2017 by Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain.[1]
History
Paris's Space Mountain had opened on June 1, 1995 as De la Terre à la Lune, a lavish Verne-themed coaster credited with helping revive the financially troubled resort. It was the largest and most extreme Space Mountain anywhere: the only one with inversions, a catapult launch and a synchronised on-board soundtrack, on a 1,000-metre Vekoma track reaching 71 km/h with three inversions — a sidewinder, a corkscrew and a cutback.[1]
For the ride's tenth anniversary, and in the year Disneyland in California celebrated its 50th anniversary, the park chose reinvention over restoration. The mountain received a complete exterior repaint in 2004, the Verne version closed on January 15, 2005, and after a short conversion the ride reopened on April 9, 2005 as Space Mountain: Mission 2, presented at launch as a continuation that went further than Verne's story rather than a simple retheme.[1][2][3]
Mission 2 proved durable, running nearly twelve years — longer than the Verne original. Its one major interruption was a refurbishment from January to July 2015, which refreshed the effects and overall presentation and added a single-rider queue. On January 8, 2017 it closed for good, and the coaster reopened on May 7, 2017 as Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain for the resort's 25th anniversary.[1]
The ride
The physical ride did not change: the track layout, the 32-metre mountain and the great Columbiad cannon all stayed. Almost everything riders saw, heard and felt around that track did. The most important mechanical change was the launch. Trains had previously been carried halfway up the cannon before being fired; Mission 2 launched them from the bottom, lengthening the launch run by nearly 40 percent and giving a longer, more sustained acceleration of about 1.3G toward the top of the mountain.[1][4]
The Victorian dressing was stripped back to a sleeker, more futuristic look. The copper-and-bronze trains were repainted silver, the open Stellar Way queue became a dim, enclosed corridor lined with photographs of cosmic phenomena and a safety video, and the Baltimore Gun Club rooms now displayed plans for a voyage to a supernova rather than to the Moon, while the queue's Victorian music loop gave way to radio messages. Steven Bramson's original score was replaced by a new synchronised on-board soundtrack by Michael Giacchino, timed closely to the effects, above all the supernova climax.[1]
On board, a countdown preceded the blast from the cannon. Riders — dubbed "exploronauts" in the launch publicity — shot past comets, planets and asteroid fields toward a supernova, which erupted and destroyed its surroundings as the train escaped. The best-known single substitution summed up the retheme: the smiling Moon face inherited from Georges Méliès, a centrepiece of the Verne ride, was gone, replaced by that exploding star. The return leg crossed a field of melting asteroids and dived through a "hypergate", a red vortex of curved neon light standing in for a shortcut across the universe, before the Electro-de-Velocitor braking device slowed the train into the station, as it had since 1995.[1]
See also
- Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain
- Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune
- Discoveryland
- List of Disneyland Park (Paris) attractions
- List of defunct Disney attractions
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-11-15.
- ↑ Space Mountain Mission 2 - press release. WDWMAGIC. Retrieved 2026-11-15.
- ↑ From the Earth to the Moon: Disneyland Paris' Legendary Lost Steampunk Space Mountain. Park Lore. Retrieved 2026-11-15.
- ↑ Space Mountain Mission 2 - press release. WDWMAGIC. Retrieved 2026-11-15.