Space Tower is ready for State Fair after tech problems closed the ride last year
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The iconic Minnesota State Fair Space Tower is back and ready to take off.
Last week, workers from a local graphics company gave the 30-story tower a snazzy upgrade to its silver facade cab: they installed adhesive red letters that read “Space Tower.” The new look evokes 1960s outer space vibes, appropriate for a ride that opened at the fair in 1964.
It’s a light reboot from last year’s fair that ended in disappointment for the ride’s owners, the Kantor family. The 330-foot-tall structure was unceremoniously closed down four days into the “Great Minnesota Get Together,” leaving visitors with one less ride option.
Manager Ben Kantor said the breakdown stumped technicians at first.
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“It wouldn’t go in the correct direction. When we hit up, it would go down. When we hit down, it would go up,” Kantor said. “So we can’t exactly run the tower in that way.”
After an additional four days of increasing troubleshooting costs with no solution in sight, the family made the decision to close the ride for the rest of the fair.
“It was probably the worst fair experience that I’ve ever had, which is probably an overstatement of the century,” he said. “So we decided to cut our losses at that point, because it was not cheap to have emergency service there at the fair working on the ride.”
Kantor and his team diagnosed the issue in January. They determined the Space Tower had some wiring issues and needed to replace three out of its four potentiometers, something akin to a light dimmer, Kantor explained.
In this case, the “dimmer” controls the speed of the ride. Normal, slowdown, acceleration and zero speed.
Kantor ordered three potentiometers from a company in Switzerland. They were made to order with Kantor pre-paying half the amount. The units arrived six weeks later in February and were installed soon afterward.
“If you’ve never done a wire transfer, it’s not the easiest thing in the world. But yeah, they were not cheap either,” Kantor said. “I don’t really want to say how much, but I almost need a loan.”
About 50,000 to 60,000 visitors pay $5 to ride the Space Tower each year, Kantor said. That means the estimated loss of revenue from the ride not operating for the remaining eight days of the fair could be more than $160,000.
Kantor would not confirm the family’s losses.
“I’d rather not say, it’s embarrassing, how much we spent,” he said.
The ride’s fare will remain $5 this year, but could possibly increase next year, Kantor said.
He is happy to inform the public that the 60-year-old ride is ready for liftoff on Aug. 22, the fair’s first day.
The ride goes through a multitude of tests daily including its emergency brakes and its components, he said.
“Even when it broke down last year during the fair, the riders were never in any jeopardy. Nobody got injured,” Kantor said. It would be “very difficult,” he added, for the ride to break in a way that somebody would be in danger of getting hurt.
Fun fact: one of the original builders of the Space Tower actually consulted when the Kantors replaced some machinery in the late 1990s, Kantor said.
“He told us that it has been so overbuilt that we could lose all but two cables on either side and still operate,” Kantor said. “It has a total of 12 cables holding the cab up. So it’s extremely overbuilt.”
In 1964, manufacturing began on the Space Tower components in Germany, according to the Space Tower website. They were shipped to the U.S., eventually arriving to Duluth. The parts were loaded up on trucks and transported to the state fairgrounds for assembly.
Correction (Aug. 1, 2024): An earlier version of this article misspelled Trevor Olson’s name in the caption of photos. The post has been updated.