2001: The EVA Pod Maquette

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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 process of design is always one of iteration.

It’s well known that the one-person EVA (extravehicular activity) pod from the film 2001: a Space Odyssey went through numerous visual and conceptual designs as it travelled from Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway’s drawing boards to the EMI Elstree prop shop to the silver screen. Various books have published snapshots of this path, in the form of drawings and paintings.

The near-final blueprints of the full sized pods, published by Adam Johnson in 2001: the Lost Science, his essential book of Frederick Ordway’s archives, show a pod that differs from the finished design in a number of minor details. The pod blueprint exhibited numerous times with the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition is much closer to the finished pod.

Narratively the film featured three different pods. But to create this illusion several physical pods were constructed, with some small continuity errors between them. The pod bay had three full-sized pods, another full-sized pod was mechanized with moving arms for the space scenes, an enlarged interior set was built, a 13.5” miniature was built, and a very small one about 3” was also built.

The maquette

The discovery of a 10 inch maquette (a filmmaking term for a production model, constructed for design purposes, that isn’t destined for the screen) of the pod in 2022 is quite interesting, since it casts some light on the differences between blueprint and finished product.

The maquette was gifted to a 2001 crew member, allegedly by Kubrick himself, and remained out of public view for decades. It was known before now from a single photograph from 1966 or so. It’s seen here on a table being reviewed by the 2001 team, who were giving some visiting VIPs a tour at the time.

From left to right: production designer Anthony Masters, director Stanley Kubrick, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of Manned Space Flight George Mueller, Argentine Space Agency administrator Teófilo Tabanera, writer Arthur C. Clarke, NASA public affairs officer Al Alibrando, designer Frederick Ordway (apparently in whites as he’d just been playing tennis), and NASA astronaut Deke Slayton.

Propstore auction

The pod was auctioned to the public by Propstore on 3 November 2022, with the winning bid going for £20,000. However, prior to the auction the company very kindly permitted me to examine and document the piece for the 2001 community. My heartiest thanks to Tim and Brandon at Propstore for their generosity.

I’d also like to thank Propstore for making high-resolution images of the maquette publicly available. This is very kind of them, and an invaluable community service for people interested in the history of the making of 2001. The snapshots on this page, bar the Andrew Birkin photo of the shooting miniature and the Kubrick and team photo above, were taken by me.

The construction

The maquette is approximately 265mm/10.4 inches tall, and is constructed primarily from laminated lathed wood, turned to a sphere. It’s very light, suggesting it may be hollow. Flat surfaces are either carved solid wood pieces or, in a couple areas, extremely thin plywood sheets.

There seem to be have been two types of wood used in its construction. The bulk of the sphere appears to be a fairly pale yellow wood, such as laminated clear pine. Certain details appear to be carved from a more orange-brown wood; perhaps a relatively soft wood such as cedar. It does not appear to be jelutong wood, which apparently was commonly used by British production companies for carving objects. The grain in the maquette looks too pronounced to be jelutong.

It was probably dropped once or twice, since crush damage is evident in the front arm/headlight area. The entire maquette is brush painted with an opaque matt white paint, perhaps a standard household paint. This is peeling or chipped in areas, revealing white primer beneath. The maquette has a number of details fastened or scribed on its surface, and a set of pencil markings indicate where various features would be added.

On the whole the maquette hews very closely to the proportions seen in the production blueprints. It also appears to have been constructed using the same methods as used on the 13” screen-used miniature. Thanks to Andrew Birkin we have a photo of that model being built, showing how it was made from laminated blocks of wood. That miniature also had elaborate turned metal components which the maquette lacks.

Although fairly rough and ready in many areas, the complexity of the maquette’s shape shows the real carpentry skills that went into making it. The EVA pod design consists of numerous geometric primitives - spheres, cones, cylinders, cubes. These are not shapes easily replicated in wood!

Amusingly the maquette is very close in size to the commercial model of the EVA pod produced by Moebius Models. Obviously Moebius didn’t know about this maquette when they designed their product, but it does mean that both are about 1/8 scale of the full-sized pods.

The ears

The biggest change from blueprint and maquette to finished pod involves the “ears”. The maquette in the 1966 photo clearly has protruding bells sticking out from each “earmuff” on the sides. These represent the RCS (reaction control system) rocket jets used for steering the vehicle and for attitude control. They exist on the blueprint as well, and are labelled “Retro” jets. Note that, like the finished pod design, the maquette vehicle would have been able to control its yaw and roll in space, but wouldn’t have been able to control its pitch! A bit of a design flaw missed by its creators.

However, Kubrick must have disliked the look of the sticky-out ears, because the final vehicles in the movie don’t have them. Instead they have half-obloid (ie: flattened half sphere) projections on each earmuff, containing five black recesses that are clearly meant to be the RCS thrusters.

The maquette as it exists today has snapped off wood cylinders indicating the location of the erstwhile RCS bells. It has a low cone on the earmuffs where the final design has the half-obloids. The cone also has a square-topped pyramidal block for attaching the bells.

The earmuffs on the finished pods also had triangular notches of two different sizes running around the edge. The maquette has simple saw cuts representing these grooves, but they don’t match the number of location of those on the finished pods, and are done quite roughly to different depths. There are also two steps to the inside of the earmuffs, whereas the finished pods had a single step. (ie: the earmuff was a flat top cone or conic frustum, attached to the pod’s sphere by a shallow cylinder)

The maquette earmuffs also have what seem to be nail heads where additional details may have been attached.

The window

The window differs from the finished pods in two key ways. First, the area representing the clear window is convex (ie: spherical), and second, the window recess is aligned to the outer sphere differently. From the front it’s egg-shaped with the wide end at the top.

The final pods had cylindrical windows (ie: curved in one direction only), probably because it’s pretty easy to bend a sheet of acrylic plastic, but more expensive to produce a spherical curvature. We know of the cylindrical shape because photos of the pod bay’s pods depict windows with straight reflections of overhead lights. However, the maquette has a window area that bulges out in both directions.

The second issue is difficult to describe verbally. Basically the finished pods had window interior openings that not vertically aligned to the outer openings. This meant that the top of the window recess was closer to horizontal, as it were. The blueprints and the maquette show pods where the window opening is set lower in the recess.  It also means that the oval of the finished pods is closer to symmetrical compared to the blueprint and maquette.

Arm slots

The blueprints and maquette both have recesses on the front of the sphere, to act as holders for the arms when they’re pulled all the way back. These are not present in the final design.

Headlamps

The blueprints have no headlights on the pod. The projecting frontmost flat planes, which have the two topmost headlamps in the finished pod design - instead have the pod’s manipulator arm sockets.

The maquette has two main unpainted points on the front where additional details were once located - perhaps it had manipulator arms that were later removed or torn off. However it also has three circular pencil marks, indicating areas where the pod arms and lower headlights were located on the final pods.

Earmuff recess details

The finished earmuffs, which were all identical fibreglass castings on the full-sized props (a single mould was used for both sides; the earmuff on one side was simply turned around, which is why they’re identical but rotated 180° from each other) had an odd detail - a small pair of recesses cut into the surface, in a geometric “IL” shape.

It isn’t strictly IL, because the lower part of the L is quite long, so I don’t know if the recesses were meant to be letters or just interesting geometric shapes. Was there someone on the production team with the initials IL that this was honouring? The final full-sized pods also have three holes next to the IL recesses, suggesting they were meant to be status lights, perhaps.

Anyway. One of the maquette’s earmuffs has “IL” lightly scribed on one side. There is also a rough outline of the longer multisided recess on one earmuff, cut into the wood surface with a knife.

Lower front edge

A not uncommon error in models and replicas is to make the lower front edge of the pod (the “U” shaped bit) a flat surface. In fact, the real pods had a sloped surface that was curved slightly inwards. This design feature is visible in the blueprint, and it’s also seen in the maquette.

Rear access door

Another common error in replica pods concerns the recessed mini access door that’s built into the rear door. This is usually modelled with straight parallel sides to the recess. But the actual full-sized pods had angled (sloped) internal sides to the recess, and you can see this in the maquette as well.

The underside

The underside of the pod represents a continuity error in the film. One version of the full-sized pod has a smooth underside with a recessed conical area for the bottom-mounted rocket engine. Another has an underside that’s encrusted with greeblies - small details.

The blueprint shows a pair of rails on either side of the bottom, presumably a sort of attachment system for the pod to glide into position on the bay. The maquette has similar grooved wooden rails on either side. This detail did not make it to the finished pod design.

Another difference concerns the engine, which is modelled fairly elaborately in the maquette. It features a conical recess (not a parabolic one) with numerous handcut grooved lines. The full-sized pod in the film has the grooves, but far fewer of them compared the maquette. The maquette also has a central conical engine bell, which is not seen on the full-sized movie pod. (It’s possible there was one there, but we simply can’t see that area in the film)

The giant engine, never seen in operation in the film, is an odd detail considering the pod always moves “forward,” as it were, and not “up”. Apparently it’s there thanks to the original concept of the pods being capable of landing on Jupiter’s moons for exploratory purposes. It is, however, shown blazing away dramatically in a promotional painting by Robert McCall.

Top starboard front camera

Interestingly the location of the frontmost starboard camera recess is marked out by three different pencilled-in circles, showing how the design changed over time. Each circle was carefully drawn with a pair of compasses.

The Adam Savage video

Adam Savage has made a video on this piece for his Tested.com website.

Copyright

This text was written entirely by and for 3Dsf.info. Feel free to make copies for your own use, but I ask that you not repost it for download elsewhere. The reason is I'm updating these pages all the time for accuracy and development purposes. So the most up to date page should always be available at 3Dsf.info, though they’re temporarily at the Age of Plastic site.

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