2001: EVA Pod Interior

The Pod Pages

Welcome to my documents related to the iconic space pods featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: a Space Odyssey. Check the sidebar to the left (or click on the three line icon) to see other related pages.

Introduction

The EVA (extravehicular activity) pods shown in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey had surprisingly complicated interiors. These internal sets featured a small one-person cockpit, designed using the finest technical knowledge available in the mid 1960s.

The vehicles were designed primarily by Harry Lange with Frederick Ordway III, in consultation with designers and engineers from Hawker Siddeley Dynamics (the interior) and the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation (the exterior), among others. The former was a British aerospace company that consulted on and built the pod interior. The latter an American aircraft manufacturer that consulted on the pod exterior, and was the primary contractor on the Apollo LEM craft. Both firms later merged with other companies and no longer exist.

The interiors have also been really difficult to figure out and reverse-engineer. The blueprints for the pod set internals no longer exist, so far as I know. And until the 4K releases and some of the photos from the Stanley Kubrick Archives came to light, it was a real challenge understanding the internal geometry of the panels, walls, and ceiling.

Various enthusiasts, including Dennis Gilliam, Paul Bodensiek, and Tom Reddie, have done considerable and stellar research into how the various panels and whatnots fit together. Reddie, in particular, built a superb and assiduously researched 3D model of the pod interior. And I think there's a pretty good understanding now of what the interior geometry was like. The Moebius Models EVA pod kit released in 2018 builds on this work and has a pretty good rendition of the vehicle's interior.

Construction

The basic concept was for the pilot to sit inside the middle of a spherical pod, surrounded by flat and easily accessible control surfaces. These panels were triangles and polygons carefully designed to fit into the available space. Only the frontmost panel, which bears the pair of separated computer displays, was curved – it was dished downwards.

It appears from behind the scenes photographs that a fibreglass sphere was made for the pod interior. The inner surfaces were almost all painted a very dark brick red; slightly more maroon in tone than brown. The walls and ceiling appear scarlet red in the final film because of the interior's red lighting, but medium format transparencies taken following set construction clearly show the brick-red interior colour, as does the still image shown below. Note that the small vertical panel just below the frontmost control panel (the vertical panel to which the cylindrical manipulator controllers were fastened, in front of the pilot’s knees) was also brick red.

The rear walls were padded with black synthetic leather. There's a photo of Frederick Ordway inside a pod under construction, showing the underside of a panel, and it reveals the prosaic banality of a bunch of ordinary furniture upholstery nails used to hold the leatherette finish onto the plywood! The bulging of each panel shows that foam was placed behind the leatherette.

Plywood on a wood frame was used to make the interior control panels, which had complex polygonal shapes at various angles for the various operating surfaces. Closeup photos of the panel surfaces show that they had a kind of satin black finish, with a brushed texture. They thus probably had Formica-type laminated plastic over top of the plywood panels.

Judging by the size of this interior under construction, and the angle of the panels, this appears to be one of the mocked-up pod interiors from the pod bay scene. (ie: it’s not the full size pod interior used for filming interior scenes)

Interior lighting

The five visible light fixtures were recessed, covered with white frosted material, and contained red light bulbs. So they were white when off, but red when on. The scarlet glow gave a submarine-like look to the interior. People often assume that the plastic surfaces of the lights were red because of this, but they weren't.

However, additional lights were used to supplement the practical lights built into the set, since the actors' faces were often lit with white light.

The panel to the lower right is not lit in this shot, showing how it was made of white (opal) translucent acrylic.

During scenes of the astronauts looking forward into the camera lens, Kubrick had images from the displays projected onto their faces. I'm sure he knew full well that computer monitors don't project sharply focused images onto anything, but they just looked cool.

Pushbuttons

The panels were covered with tons of actual illuminated pushbuttons. Most weren’t merely backlit acrylic plastic squares or a simple approximation like that. There's a photo in the Archives of a technician working on the panels, and you can see masses of wires underneath each surface, for all the hundreds of buttons and their associated miniature incandescent bulbs. Conjecture: the buttons do not appear to be standard off-the-shelf 1960s industrial pushbuttons, so it seems probable that they were acrylic buttons handcrafted by the studio, with suitable electrical switches underneath.

The buttons were grouped in colours, and the colour came from the plastic of the buttons. (ie: they weren't all white buttons with different coloured light bulbs – the buttons were different colours of plastic). Blueprints make reference to Perspex blue 725, Perspex yellow 250, orange 363, and opal 030 plastics, though this numbering system does not appear to be in use today – with the exception of opal 030. The white (opal) buttons had a slightly yellowish cast on film because of the use of tungsten incandescent bulbs.

This wasn't a 1960s BatComputer - there weren't any meaningless and random flashing Christmas lights all over the place. I think I've only ever seen one light on one left-hand panel flash without someone physically pressing the button. The switches were wired to turn the button lights on and off when pressed, and you can see this in the film.

The pushbuttons were also all individually labelled. Closeup photos of the panels reveal that almost every single pushbutton contained a piece of text identifying its function. (ON, OFF, EXTEND, RETRACT, LOCK, CONTRAST, etc etc) A few buttons also had arrow icons in addition to the text. Only two buttons, located on the rear starboard side, are blank with no text for some reason.

High resolution photos exist of enough of the set interior to be able to decipher maybe around 80% of all the buttons on the interior.

Features were positioned together in labelled logical groups, so a set of buttons might be said to be controlling one area of pod operations. This is in keeping with Kubrick's insistence that everything about the sets be as believable and convincing as possible. This wasn't about slapping random bits of text on stuff. The groups had rectangular white and blue outlines drawn around them. Closeup photographs of these surfaces suggest that the lines were actually painted or silkscreened onto the plastic surfaces. This is unlike the low-cost panels of the Millennium Falcon, for example, where automotive pinstriping tape was used. (another set that Harry Lange designed and worked on)

Switches

In addition to the pushbuttons there are a few locations where regular store-bought 1960s toggle and paddle switches (the kind you flip up or down) are visible.

The back panel on the starboard rear wall has a row of chromed toggle switches above the row of green lights. Bowman flicks these off, one by one, during the lip-reading scene. Funnily enough, in the film the second and third switches are installed slightly higher than the others in the row. (ie: they weren't perfectly in line)

The two round panels on the wall, to either side of the window, also have switches, though they were black-handled paddle switches. Each switch had a chromed ring holding it in place. The panel on the starboard (right) side had six switches - two rows of three. The one on the port (left) side only had two switches with a gap between them where a third would have been.

Round panel continuity error

Amusingly the starboard round panel is upside-down in some scenes. And the port one is rotated 90 degrees in one scene but not others. Oops.

The correct orientation of the starboard panel is with the six flat toggle switches at the top (the round things are black-handled paddle switches, not lights), and the three blue illuminated pushbuttons at the bottom. I can say this with confidence because a high-rez picture in the Archives has legible text on the buttons and panel. That said, I think it shows up more often upside-down in the film than right-side up.

I can't say with certainty what the correct orientation of the two-switch panel on the port side should be, because I haven't found any high-rez shots of it. It seems reasonable to guess it should be with the three blue pushbuttons at the bottom, however, to match the starboard panel.

The “explosive bolts” controller

There's an anodized green aluminium box containing a set of buttons for triggering the explosive bolts for releasing the back door. This was actually a repurposed personal equipment connector (PEC) from a Martin Baker ejection seat for a fighter plane. This is half of a special device that feeds main oxygen, emergency oxygen, and electronic connections between the seat assembly and the cockpit. It's specially designed to be able to separate instantly if the ejection seat needs to be fired off.

The round “pushbuttons” that Bowman presses in the film are thus actually hose connectors, and not buttons at all! It was one of the few obviously repurposed bits of set dressing seen inside the pod cockpit.

A safety cover was also clipped over the box containing the buttons. This was the matching half of the PEC, with an apparently custom-machined polished aluminium plate on the front (the piece shown below under Bowman's thumb).

For most of the film this cover was clipped over the box. However, Bowman stows the removed cover in the small box on top of the flat triangular area below his right elbow - it wasn't left to float randomly around the pod cockpit. We never actually see the storage box being opened, but Bowman definitely uses it, though the box is out of frame. If you look closely at the film you can see a split-second glimpse of the lid being flipped closed.

This is the storage box I mentioned at the top of this page - it’s part rectangular at the front with an angled back edge, where the hinges were. It's not square or rectangular, as it's been depicted before, when it's been depicted at all.

Display technology

One of the conceptual technological breakthroughs in the film was the use of reconfigurable monitors for data output. Back in the 1960s, vehicle and technical input controllers still corresponded basically 1:1 with the actual thing being controlled. In other words, you'd have a switch that opened a flap, or a lever that controlled a device's output. You'd also have output devices in the form of dials and lights that only showed one type of information – temperature, airspeed, pressure, etc. I consider these to be kind of first-generation interfaces.

2001's scientific advisors recommended that Kubrick use display monitors on his spaceships. These would be television-type screens capable of displaying all kinds of informational content. So instead of tons of dedicated dials and meters you'd have these screens, showing computer-driven graphic information in a flexible and reconfigurable fashion. These I consider to be second generation since the output has been decoupled from the input.

The next logical step in designing control interfaces came with Star Trek: the Next Generation in 1987. Its designer Michael Okuda introduced the idea of display panels that not only showed different types of information but which acted as instantly reconfigurable touchscreen interface devices as well, thus eliminating the need for specific controls for specific functions. Ironically this approach arose from a desire to limit costs, since backlit transparencies were cheaper than building panels festooned with physical switches. But they inadvertently helped create a compelling vision of the future – one we experience every day with our touchscreen phones. And I consider those to be third generation interfaces – the same panels are used for both input and output.

Anyway. 2001 didn't go as far as Star Trek TNG, since the input devices (the pushbuttons, mostly) were still very much related to single functions. But the high-tech computer screens were quite dazzling for the time. They were also perfectly flat, unlike the bulging glass tubes of ordinary CRT TVs. This was again on the advice of the scientific advisors, who suggested that by 2001 it would be possible to build completely flat display systems like that. We had to wait many decades before decent LCD monitors became possible, of course, though by the real year 2001 they were actually around. Amusingly the sequel to 2001, 2010, was not filmed by Kubrick and took a mighty leap backwards by using ugly bulging CRT displays for its monitors.

Simulating the displays

All the spacecraft featured in 2001: a Space Odyssey boasted full complements of digital flat-panel displays, continuously updated by on-board computers. Super high tech stuff!

So high tech, in fact, that the filmmakers didn’t use a single computer to create this futuristic illusion, because digital technology for realtime animation simply did not exist in 1968. Instead they laboriously constructed loops of movie film by photographing drawings, Letraset rub-down lettering, and typewritten cards on an animation stand. These handcrafted “computer” sequences were then transferred to spools of 16mm film and projected onto flat screens built into the sets. The film's sleek modernistic consoles were actually concealing 1960s 16mm projectors and miles of wiring!

The design of the displays was primarily supervised and done by Douglas Trumbull. The work on the projectors was by special effects technician Brian Johnson, who later went on to supervise special effects for the Empire Strikes Back and Alien, amongst many other films. 

Pod bay interior

The interior actually represents a significant continuity issue in the film. This is because the interiors of the pods in the full-sized bay were of a certain size and design. Whereas the interior of the pod used for filming the actual interior scenes was of a different size and design.

Two of the three pods parked in the bay apparently had rudimentary interiors, but you don’t really see them in the film. The middle pod had a more mocked-up interior, and it’s clearly, albeit partially, visible for the scenes of the astronauts boarding the vehicle.

This set photo, by photojournalist Dmitri Kessel (is that perhaps where George Lucas got the name for the Kessel Run?) shows the mocked-up interior. It's hard to make out very much, but the central video screens are clearly flat instead of angled inwards, and this set is missing the manipulator arm control cylinders visible in the interior set.

This is probably the best view of the mocked-up interior, showing it had very different internal geometry from the full-sized interior set. Notice the triangular side panels and how nearly vertical they look. Compare those to the interior view panels shown later in this article. Note also the thickness of the retracted door.

This bay pod with interior was never seen directly from the front in the final film. However, there are a lot of promotional still images of the actors in their suits inside the pod sets, such as the photo below. There are also photos and storyboards in the Archives of a filmed sequence showing Bowman inside his pod, as the rectractable platform is drawn back into the bay. This post-spacewalk scene was not included in the movie. It was possibly one of the scenes trimmed from the film for general release, following the premiere in April 1968.

Instead a more fully detailed and fully lit set was constructed for filming the pod interior scenes.

The interior shooting set

The pod's interior set appears to have been built on a different soundstage from the pod bay set.

This internal cockpit had removable panels or walls (known to cinematographers and set designers as “wild” or “flyaway” walls) which would allow the camera to be inserted into the set as required. In this awesome behind the scenes shot you can see Kubrick, cigarette ever-present, directing Gary Lockwood as Poole. They're inside the separate interior set, which has its ceiling, door, and port side removed.

The interior set was of course large enough to hold both actors during the lip-reading scene. Note that they're not sitting on seats, as there weren't any on the sides. They're actually sitting on the sort of storage box lids, by the armrests.

Of course, the pod bay set is clearly visible through the window in this scene. Two possibilities seem likely: either the middle pod was taken out of the pod bay and the interior set forklifted into place just for this one scene, or a small piece of the pod bay set was reconstructed outside the window of the interior set. I kind of suspect the former was done, but that's pure conjecture. It's not a Duratrans or some other projection, as the lighting is spot on, plus the animated HAL screen works.

This cockpit set also required considerable clearance on the underside. Each of the six display monitors required a flat screen driven by a 16mm film projector, and this all took up a lot of room!

There are unpublished photos in the Kubrick Archives of an enormous Panavision camera with a massive wide-angle lens sticking in the front window, for filming the scenes of Keir Dullea inside the pod, looking straight at the audience.

Size differences

There are many differences between the pod interior in the pod bay, and the pod interior built for interior filming. Most importantly the interior set appears to have been physically larger than the interior built for the bay pod, and with different internal geometry. In other words, the interior set couldn’t have fit inside the exterior pod! Consider the two photos below.

At first glance they look the same, but close examination reveals that they were completely different sets. The upper image shows Keir Dullea inside the pod bay mockup set. The lower image shows him in the fully kitted-out interior set. The giveaway is the display panel on the right side of the photo. Notice how compressed the upper one is - the buttons are closer together. While the blue and white buttons are the same size, there is less vertical space between each row. The lower panel is expanded slightly because of the larger amount of room to fill. Also, as shown in earlier photos in this article, the angles of the internal panels differ and the cover plate over the “explosive bolts” pushbutton panel is different (it has black circles on it which are not present on the full-sized interior set).

The two images above are screenshots taken directly from the film. On the left you can see the view into the pod from the pod bay shot shown earlier in this article. On the right you can see the interior pod set from the scene when the astronauts are conspiring against HAL.

A close examination shows that the two sets are completely different. The geometry of the sets is clearly not the same.  Buttons on the lower left console are missing, and buttons on the right side are reduced in number. The hand controller prop, which is presumably the same prop moved from one set to the other, clearly shows that the interiors were sized very differently.

This method of representing something through the use of two completely different film sets is a pretty common technique when making films and TV shows, much to the consternation of fans trying to get that perfect canonical representation of a beloved spaceship or apartment or whatever. There's no way in hell the Millennium Falcon's internal hold set would ever have fit into the set representing the outside of the ship. The Overlook Hotel’s exterior couldn’t have accommodated its interior. Massive warehouse-sized sitcom apartments could never fit into the external street views of that apartment building. And so on.

Hawker Siddeley logo

Many different companies contributed ideas and consulting assistance to the hardware of 2001. One of these was now-defunct British aerospace manufacturer Hawker Siddeley, best remembered today for developing the Harrier jump jet aircraft.

Hawker Siddeley Dynamics assisted with the construction of the 2001 sets, and photos exist in the Archives of a team of HS staff paying a visit to EMI Elstree. In fact, according to Ordway quoted in Frayling’s The 2001 File, Hawker Siddeley actually constructed the pod interior set at their Stevenage facility. As an acknowledgement, there's a tiny nameplate on the dashboard of the pod with the Hawker Siddeley logo. Sadly for the company, it's virtually impossible to see in the actual film!

Interestingly the Stevenage facilities of Hawker Siddeley Dynamics housed the Reinforced and Microwave Plastics Group, which would have been the ideal specialist facility for making the fibreglass components used on the interior of the pod. This is conjecture on my part, however, as I have no confirmation that this was the case.

The nameplate is the same size as one of the rectangular pushbuttons, and is located on the left side of the pod interior, just below one of the paired displays. Here's my reconstruction of what the plate looked like.

I used the Univers 57 Condensed Oblique typeface for this reconstruction, but I don't know for certain if it's what was used in the original. The plate was white, and had a thin black line inset.

The greebly box

A little-known odd detail of the EVA pod is a funny-looking collection of random greeblies stuck to a panel. It's situated right next to the left-hand control cylinder for operating the exterior manipulators (waldo controllers). Here's a low-resolution photo showing that area.

I've modelled this panel thingie, based on an unpublished medium format high-resolution colour transparency, and I think it looked something like this. This isn't perfect, and I simplified the rods with nuts and the wires somewhat, but it's reasonably close.

The panel was painted a uniform brick red, just like the vertical panel it was affixed to, and indeed the whole interior of the pod. However the sort of knob/toothpaste tube cap thing at the lower left side, and the light-bulb like spherical thing on the lower right were both bright red.

The hydraulic details

A bunch of small complicated-looking boxes, apparently connected by hoses, are located all over the interior of the pod. All are fastened to the red-brown curvature of the pod ceiling, and all are painted the same colour as the ceiling.

I haven’t been able to determine what precisely they used to make these details, but they do appear to be found objects, and they closely resemble hydraulic devices still sold today. They also look similar to the black greebly objects located around the perimeter of the circular black grid used as landing platforms in the pod bay set.

Most of the boxes appear in high-resolution Keith Hamshere photos, but four are only partially known through low-rez shots and screenshots from the movie.

In addition to these hydraulic objects there is small black handrail, identical to two silver handrails seen inside the Discovery cockpit set, screwed to the ceiling right above the door. Actor Gary Lockwood, who played astronaut Frank Poole, said that he suggested the installation of this handrail to Kubrick when they were rehearsing scenes when they had to enter the pod.