Constructing a Cruise Ship | Making the Disney Wish | Mini Episode 1

We are building the most technologically advanced, the most beautiful cruise ships ever. What the Disney Wish is the first of its kind, never been done before.

So how do you build a Disney Wish? It's a first-in-class ship, so you start with a white piece of paper. The construction phase is always one of the most amazing phases because you can see things come to life. The Disney Wish is the first of its kind. It's a very iterative process; design engineering, together with interior designers, takes a good year and a half. So approximately one and a half to two years in already, we will then actually cut the first piece of steel off.

Off we go, and then there is no stopping it. They actually subdivide the entire shipping blocks. Those blocks are subdivided in sections, and each section is unique. This is block 73, the main bridge of our ship, where the captain will navigate the ship. They build like in car manufacturing, but instead of having all the same cars, these are all unique sections but built in the same way. It's mind-blowing when you see it for the first time; that's pretty spectacular.

The ship has more than 100 blocks. Typically, a block would be the full width of a ship and usually three to four decks high. More than 100 of those creates the entire ship. The ship is really, really big. The ship will be more than 60 million kilograms, close to 150 million pounds. They're 1.2 million square feet, almost three football fields long. Just the technical aspect of that is mind-blowing. It floats.

I know someone did a lot of math, but I still don't understand how it floats, but it floats. How does the ship float? Our common principle says that an object and its volume will displace water. The weight of the water that displaces needs to be at least the weight of that object.

Let's think of a golf ball; that's quite dense and heavy. When you put that in the water, it will displace water; it will sink. If you take a soccer ball, a lot of air inside, so it's not very dense, that will also displace some water, but only its own weight. We all know it will float. A cruise ship is quite large, and a lot of volume inside, empty spaces. It actually only displaces a little bit of water and stays above the water.

I cannot believe it's actually happening—like pinching myself. Unbelievable! It's going so fast now. There are these three pieces of ship being built: the fore ship, the aft, and then the midship, which we call the Giga block. That Giga block will actually go inside the hull, then get connected to our fore ship. This blows me away because, quite practically, this is a skyscraper floating towards us. It's crazy.

While they're building the ship, they're also building the staterooms. When the shipyard builds like this, they can do a lot of pre-outfitting; that's what it's all about. Check it out! Look at this one completed, prefabricated stateroom. It's ramping up very quickly to our Disney Wish, getting completed and coming out of the hull in all our glory.

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