Introduction

On Saturday, July 23, 2011, I was a speaker at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco at the request of Diane Disney Miller to talk about her father’s interest in America’s space program, especially through his trilogy of television shows produced in the 1950s.

The hour and a half presentation was entitled “Walt’s Fascination with Outer Space” and was based on a series of articles I had written. In addition, I talked about the live action film Moon Pilot (1962) that was being shown by the museum.

Three years later, I was invited back again on November 8, 2014 to the museum for the presentation “How Walt Put a Man on the Moon” sharing the stage with space historian Eric Toldi when the museum ran the “Man in Space” television episode.

So when it came time to write the latest installment in the Vault of Walt series with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission moon landing and the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and Walt Disney World fresh in my mind, it seemed appropriate to pull out my previous research, update it and add new stories. My own fascination with how Disney presented both the facts and fantasy of outer space has never faded.

Walt Disney died in 1966 and never got a chance to see the moon landing in 1969 nor the launch of the first Space Shuttle in 1981. He had predicted both events in his television shows.

I eagerly watched both of those achievements live on television and they sparked my imagination and hope for the future. Like many kids of my generation, I was enamored of space travel, astronauts and other worlds.

Stephen Bales was inspired to become an aeronautical engineer after watching the Disney television programs when they originally aired in the 1950s. He went on to become a NASA guidance officer at mission control during the Apollo 11 moon landing. He told a reporter: “It was the Walt Disney show come to life!”

Both of those historic achievements in space travel owed their success to the vision of Dr. Wernher von Braun, one of the most prominent spokesmen for space exploration and the first director of NASA. Von Braun spent much time with Walt talking about the theories that would make those and other events possible.

When Walt Disney World opened in 1971, someone commented to his older brother Roy that it was a shame that Walt never got to see it completed. Roy smiled and replied, “He did.”

Walt’s imagination was so vivid that given enough information he could envision the final product and so he probably clearly saw the moon landing years before it actually happened.

The Walt Disney Company from their films to attractions in their theme parks has produced over the decades both a factual and a fanciful outer space experience to provide a sense of wonder to so many people. In this book is a brief glimpse at what they did and how they did it.

Time to blast off into the fascinating frontier of Disney in outer space!