Here's an FAQ-style list of excitingly trivial and thrillingly obscure facts about the extravehicular activity (EVA) pods from the film 2001: a Space Odyssey.
This document covers two very broad and different areas. There are the real-life aspects to how the pods were designed and built, as movie props for a piece of fiction. And then there are the narrative aspects to the pods as vehicles – what they were supposed to do and and how they’d operate in the context of that fiction.
Because this thing is so stupidly long I divided it into sections. At some point I'll probably add photos and images to the page. I haven't yet since New Google Sites makes adding images in long documents a massive pain.
Why did I do this? Well, basically it's related to my work on making a model of the EVA pods. I've posted it here in case it's of interest or use to anyone else.
Story-wise the EVA pods were small fictional spacecraft, supposedly equipped with basic life support, remote manipulator, and propulsion systems, which would allow a single pilot to travel in open space for relatively short distances. They were multifunction, but critically used for maintenance work on the Discovery mothership.
The pods were devised conceptually by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke as a plot device to get the astronauts outside the main Discovery spacecraft, but were also very carefully considered from a scientific and engineering perspective. Though they were complete fiction in the mid 1960s, and indeed could still not be built today, they were designed with an eye to realism and accuracy, considering the designers’ views of likely scientific and technical advancements.
Judging by the pre-production drawings and paintings that exist, the bulk of the design work was by 2001 science advisor Harry Lange, assisted by colleague Frederick Ordway III. Since filmmaking is a collaborative process, other members of the production team (particularly art director Tony Masters) may have contributed to the pod design as well.
Harry Lange did various drawings of the pod interior, but the full-sized cockpit set was built by British aerospace firm Hawker-Siddeley Dynamics, who contributed to its final design.
We don’t know all the people who constructed the original pod sets. That information is lost in the mists of time.
Tons of poring over primary sources (ie: contemporary to the film itself, and from the production) basically.
The original full-sized pods from the 1960s no longer exist. For many years it was difficult learning about the design of the vehicles, but in the last decade or so considerable original material has come to light. There are four main sources for this:
As of 2018 a 4K Blu-Ray scan of the original movie is available, so we can finally get high quality still frames of various scenes.
Most of the material kept by Stanley Kubrick himself is now in the Stanley Kubrick Archives, at the University of the Arts London. Some of this has been published in books such as Piers Bizony’s book the Making of 2001: a Space Odyssey. Other unpublished material was examined for this work, courtesy the Archives team.
2001 advisor Frederick Ordway kept a lot of material, especially copies of blueprints and photographs, and much of this content has been published in two books titled 2001: the Lost Science by Adam K. Johnson.
Various photographers were permitted on set during the filming of 2001, and many of these photos have been published in diverse places or made available via stock libraries.
This article is based on this primary material. Any guesswork on my part is specifically marked as conjecture. In an age of misinformation and lies I’m not interested in publishing bullshit theories, even on a webpage dedicated to something as trivial as a prop from an old movie.
It's worth noting that a particularly valuable source of information is the series of photographs taken in 1966 by 2001 set photographer Keith Hamshere. He documented the pod bay and almost all of the pod interior, both shortly before filming began and during filming. His photos look fantastic even today, because they were colour transparencies shot using massive sheets of large-format film. This is incredibly lucky, because such high-rez photos do not exist of any other 2001 sets that I'm aware of. Hundreds of 35mm behind-the-scenes shots, many in black and white and some just scans of contact prints or Polaroids, covered many otherwise undocumented areas.
Special thanks to Jan Harlan, and the Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts London, for their kind assistance in making this writeup possible.
This text is copyright © 2024 and was written entirely by and for 3Dsf.info, with the exception of the two articles by Frederick Ordway. Feel free to make copies for your own use, but I ask that you not repost it for download elsewhere. 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.
If you have any corrections or comments, feel free to drop a line:
contact@3dsf.info