Walt Disney World
Epcot
Lake Buena Vista, Florida
January 25 & 26 2013
Page Fourteen






Each one of the four crew members is given a job to do on the journey to Mars from Commander, Pilot, Navigator and Engineer.  On the way to your ship these photos of some real and some fictional space pioneers are there to motivate you into giving your all at the job that you are given.



This is a photo of one of the simulator pods that you ride in for your simulated flight to Mars.  Missions Space uses several centrifuges in order to put you through positive as well as negative g forces.  Both Bond and I ended up a little queasy with the easy version so I'm certain the intense version would have ruined my day.  If you get sick easy take the green crew instead of red crew and you'll not have to use one of Mission Space's conveniently placed barf bags that ride along with you in the simulator.



There are a few pavilions at Future World we were unable to make it to due to time including Living With the Seas (we skipped it as one of the parks on our plans for this trip was Sea World) and Ellen's Energy Adventure which never really excited me and I'm pretty sure Bond wouldn't have liked it that well. 



I did want to go and play around in Innoventions which houses a bunch of new tech goodies but time was against us as our plans for the evening included another flight on Soarin' and then a boat ride across World Showcase Lagoon for some time in Morocco and dinner at Tokyo Dining before witnessing Illuminations. 

The last time I did get into Innoventions was in 1997 when the Internet was to most people really new and one of the new products on display was called the "WebTV".  The idea for it was computers were really expensive back then when the Pentium 2 chip was the big thing and most internet connections were over your phone line with a blazing fast 56KBS connection (if you were lucky).  The idea was people would buy a dedicated internet system that was a bare bones computer with a keyboard and mouse that could only surf the web using your television set instead of a monitor for a few hundred dollars instead of several thousand for a real computer.   At Innoventions these WebTV's were all set up for people to browse the "World Wide Web".  Being the computer geek (been messing around with computers since the late 70's on a mainframe my Step Father worked on) I hopped on and took a look at how a very young (2 years old) Negative-G looked on WebTV.  As soon as I typed in "negative-g.net" (The site started out as a .net until some Chinese porn site stole that domain name so I switched to .com) the WebTV crashed.  Shocked the tech guys asked me to do it again so I did on another unit with the same outcome and then I did it again on four or five other machines before leaving laughing at how the WebTV couldn't even handle the simple HTML that made up this site back then.  Discovering bugs can be quite rewarding. 

Oh WebTV ended up getting bought out by Microsoft so I guess there was a market for it. 
 



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Paul B. Drabek