This article is part I of an article on the EVA pod vehicles from the film 2001: a Space Odyssey.
You can also jump back to the introductory page for EVA Pod Research.
One of the continuity errors in the film is that the front panels of the three pods parked inside the pod bay each contain a recessed metal dish with a simple camera lens. The lenses had fluted metal barrels, much like the voiceprint ID camera on the space station.
However, the space scenes show a flying pod that had a black and red HAL 9000 video camera lens instead. The HAL camera used the same Nikkor (Nikon) 8mm f/8 fisheye lens that was used to make the HAL faceplates seen in the Discovery interior sets.
Conjecture: perhaps Kubrick decided he really wanted to emphasize the fact that HAL had deliberately murdered Poole using the EVA pod as a weapon, and that he wanted to do so by jump cutting towards the HAL lens. But the pod bay scenes, which were presumably filmed earlier, were shot prior to this decision and so contain an earlier pod design with ordinary cameras in the front.
Yes.
Another continuity error involves the exterior front panel beneath the EVA pod window. When HAL commands the empty pod to spin around and murder Frank there's a rapid series of brief jump cuts showing the pod getting closer and closer. The closeup view of the front panel is actually a mocked-up panel with different details from those on the full-sized pods seen elsewhere in the film. (these details are in addition to the aforementioned HAL lens)
Conjecture: presumably Kubrick felt that the actual front panels didn’t hold up to close scrutiny, and had someone build a new one for closeup purposes. And it was deemed unnecessary to achieve perfect continuity, since after all it’d be on-screen for a fraction of a second anyway. Little did anyone know that half a century later people with personal computers and 4K film scans would be poring over individual film frames, taking careful notes!
There are also extremely minor differences between the pod bay pods’ panels and the space pod panels, in addition to the HAL lens mentioned above. The main difference here is that the pod bay pods have a small grey block-like object – rectangular, curved outward slightly, with fine horizontal grooves – at the top of the front panel assembly.
To summarize:
The three full-sized pod bay pods had identical front panels. Each had a slender metal camera barrel mounted in an aluminium dish.
One of the full-sized pods used for the space scenes is similar to the pod bay pods, but has the HAL lens added and is missing the small grey ridged block at the top. There is an aluminium dish behind the HAL lens, just like the dish behind the silver camera tubes on the pod bay pods.
The attack sequence full-sized space pod has the HAL lens with aluminium backing dish, but it also has coloured red and black lines, in partial arcs, around the front panel rings.
The closeup panel for the attack sequence has extra details which differ significantly from the full-sized pods, plus it has the coloured arcs. The HAL lens is present, but has no aluminium dish behind it.
The 13.5" miniature has a scaled-down and simplified panel that seems to resemble the full-sized pod bay pod (no HAL, no coloured lines).
Incidentally, it's not known what all the greebly objects on the front panel were supposed to represent, other than the obvious camera lenses. The in-progress October 1965 blueprints indicated that the port-side trellis detail area would be the “TOOL PANEL” but whether they carried through on that idea, I don't know. I've heard the theory that maybe they were supposed to be probe launchers, which might contradict the idea of a probe “locker,” described later. The large recess on the lower port side is labelled “ED PROBE” on the actual pods. But I would have thought that a single probe makes little sense - you'd want to be able to launch multiple small probes on a mission.
Other blocks of text on the front panel read “BY LOOP CONNECT”, “SEAL RPLM 6C 124”, “INL LENS ONLY”, “MULTIPLE MONITOR”, “EAC CONNECT”, “ED PROBE”, and “TO OPEN”, if that sheds any light.
No.
The five or six (depending on the pod) aluminium dishes that are recessed into the main sphere are narratively meant to contain video cameras. Fans in the past, often viewing the film on low-resolution videotapes and relying on grainy photos in books and magazines, have incorrectly assumed that these dishes were rocket thrusters.
Close-up photos in the Kubrick Archives, and careful examination of the shot of the pod in the alien hotel from film footage itself, clearly show visible lenses within fluted and turned metal cylinders. The film's original blueprints call them “television eyes,” which is charmingly anachronistic. These cameras, incidentally, look similar to the angled-down ones in the Space Station V set during the voiceprint ID scene, and the one in the PicturePhone.
The cone on the port aft side, at the top, also contains a camera lens at the tip, incidentally. It’s presumably inside a projecting cone because a recessed dish in that area would have interfered with the rotating pod bay door.
One problem with the camera placement is that there’s no visual coverage of the underside of the pod, looking straight down. This would presumably be a real drawback when landing the pod on eg: a moon of Jupiter, or a pod bay pad.
Frederick Ordway noted that “it was found possible to produce all-round TV coverage with eight fixed cameras.” Conjecture: perhaps the original design intent was to have had additional cameras covering those blind spots, but they were nixed later for aesthetic reasons.
Narratively there were at least two types of rocket engines on the pods. There was a large engine recessed into the flat underside. And the five black circular recesses around the protruding hemispherical domes on the two earmuffs (the conical sections with spherical protrusions on the port and starboard sides of the pods) were meant to be the pod’s small directional rockets.
The figure-8 shapes on the flat part of the earmuffs might conceivably have been intended to be contain thrusters as well, but it's not clear, and they don't look very functional in that regard. (they have flat plates in the middle with no obvious opening for rocket jets)
As detailed in the next section, the EVA pods' designers assumed that the vehicles would be driven by chemical reaction engines: ie: fuel-burning rockets. This is different from the Discovery One ship, which had to travel way out to Jupiter and was said to use a fictitious “Cavradyne” propulsion system powered by nuclear fission.
Engine operation is not discussed in the film itself. However, Frederick Ordway described how he thought the thrusters would narratively function in the March 1970 issue of Spaceflight magazine:
A subliming solid system provides vernier propulsion, wherein the solid propellent sublimes at a constant pressure and is emitted from a nozzle. Such reaction jets will last for long periods of time, should have great reliability and use mechanical valves.
Vernier thrusters are small secondary rocket engines for fine vehicle movement – particularly orientation in space – as opposed to the large primary thruster such as the one on the bottom of the ship, which would move the vehicle rapidly or for prolonged periods.
“Subliming” means that these rockets supposedly used some kind of solid fuel that could be immediately converted to gas by a process of sublimation (ie: going from a solid to gaseous state without passing through a liquid state). The gas would serve as a propellant via the thrusters, providing instantaneous control. Sublimation engines were a concept studied in the 1960s, so Ordway was drawing upon what seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.
The four side-pointing recesses also have trapezoidal black shields, which would protect the surface of the earmuff from being damaged by the hot rocket plumes. You can see functionally similar “jet plume deflectors” sticking out from the reaction control system (RCS) rocket engine assemblies on the Apollo lunar module, which protected the thin shell of the spacecraft.
Incidentally the EVA pod interior control panels, designed for the film with a team of engineers from British aerospace contractors Hawker Siddeley, had buttons for these motors, which were specifically referred to as “vernier” rockets. The actual movement of the pod, via the verniers, would have been controlled using the hand-shaped control devices on the pod's dashboard.
Narratively, no.
Short version: the pods don't have enough directional thrusters.
Long version: when floating around in open space you wouldn’t need huge engines simply to manoeuvre, since you’re not fighting against the gravity of a nearby planet or whatever. And so the small jet propulsion engines on the earmuffs would indeed have been more than enough to fly the little pod around the Discovery at modest speeds for maintenance, etc.
As noted in the previous section, each of the two earmuffs (protruding flat cone things on each side of the pod) has five holes that narratively were the RCS thrusters.
It’s worth noting that the earmuff engines don't look like traditional Rao nozzles. Most real-life rocket bells are nearly parabolic in shape for energy efficiency, following the pioneering research of engineer Gadicharla Rao in the 1960s. However the recesses in the 2001 pod earmuffs are clearly conical (or bi-conical), since the engraved rifling lines are straight and not curved. Cones are obviously way easier for prop makers to build than parabolic curves, though, so I don't exactly blame them for that. They were also black inside, and so it's hard to see the rifling lines without boosting the shadow detail of a screenshot.
Interestingly all ten rockets had long engine bells sticking out in earlier pod designs (both the physical maquette and earlier blueprints), but these were omitted from the final versions.
The earmuffs also had the figure-8 shaped thingies which look like they might possibly be fine propulsion motors, though they wouldn’t be very useful ones since they all seem to point the same way (perpendicular to the face of the sides). The larger of the figure 8 dishes also don’t seem to have holes for rocket exhaust – they seem to be flat plates with engraved lines on the wide conical sides. I guess they could be variants of an expansion-deflection nozzle, though.
The only problem with the EVA pod RCS design is that it’s a few engines short of the minimum, a fact pointed out to me by author and 2001 expert Piers Bizony. The earmuff-mounted rockets wouldn’t have any control over the pod’s pitch. Pitch in a flying vehicle is essentially the ability to tilt up or down – in an airplane this would mean raising or lowering the nose.
The EVA pod pilots would have full control over their roll and yaw, and would also be able to support forward translation in an inefficient way. (inefficiently because the rearmost engines on the earmuffs do not seem to point directly back) But there’s no obvious way that the earmuff motors could adjust the pitch in a useful way, given where they are placed. The pilot would have to roll the pod, yaw it, then roll it back. A pretty bad idea.
By comparison the Apollo lunar ascent module had 16 RCS engines (the command module had 12), providing total control over all three axes of motion. These engines supported both rotation (spinning around) and translation (moving in a specific direction).
I mean, I guess there could be some kind of reaction wheel or control moment gyroscope mechanism inside the EVA pod that could be used for attitude control, like many space probes and satellites today. But if so, why have the RCS thrusters? Or maybe the motors were highly adjustable via gimbals, meaning they could be turned up or down internally, directing the jet plumes above or below the centre line of the rocket opening. That might have given a bit more control.
Still, the logical design solution would have been to position four additional rocket engines in a diamond shape around the perimeter of the door. Each engine would point straight back, and all four engines would fire simultaneously for forward translation/movement. The pod would then be able to pitch up by firing its lower engine of the four, and pitch down by firing the upper one. The existing earmuff engines would have been adequate for moving the pod backwards if necessary.
However all the rocket engines on the final pods were either on the sticking-out earmuffs or on the boxy underside, and none are attached directly to the pressure sphere. So maybe they wanted to avoid that.
As noted earlier, the recesses with silver dishes and cylinders located around the pod were cameras, not engines angling out.
There was a large recessed rocket on the underside of the pod. It's visible in the movie itself, and it's labelled “BOOSTER” on the in-progress blueprints of October 1965. People have long wondered about the narrative point of this one, since it would obviously just send the pod vertically (relative to the seated astronaut) if fired in space. Even when Bowman was in a hurry to try and rescue Poole he didn't use this engine, since his pod travelled “horizontally,” as it were. Presumably he wanted to keep an eye out the window as he approached Poole’s body, rather than relying purely on the electronic collision/distance indicator.
This underside engine has a solid story rationale, though not one mentioned in the film itself. The pods were meant to be used for exploring the moons of Jupiter as well as for local Discovery-based ship maintenance. The pod engines would therefore have been useful for landing on and taking off from a small Jovian moon, much like the rocket bell on the underside of the Apollo lunar module. (okay – the LEM actually had two such rockets, one on the descent stage and one on the ascent stage, but you know what I mean)
In the March 1970 issue of Spaceflight magazine Frederick Ordway wrote:
The main propulsion system is powered by storable liquids. This system, however, would only be employed in situations involving soft landing on a small moon or travelling at considerable distances from the Discovery.
I don't think he ever specified what liquid fuels he had in mind. Perhaps hypergolic engines (rockets which spontaneously ignite when the fuel and oxidizer components combine) like on the Apollo lunar module and service/command modules. The main problem with hypergolics is that the fuels used today, such as hydrazine, are unbelievably toxic. This would have made parking a vehicle powered by such fuel in an open pod bay problematic. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen would also be an issue, since you'd have to keep it all cryogenic at all times, even in direct sunlight or in the shirtsleeves environment of the Discovery’s pod bay.
Not sure how such a big rocket bell, and its associated jet engine machinery, would fit in the small space directly under the pilot’s ass. Though I guess the Apollo lunar module did have a metal cylinder to cover the ascent engine that protruded into the cabin, and astronauts used to sit on it.
Real spacecraft built today often have visible rocket plumes, though the amount varies depending on the type of fuel used, whether the rocket is firing in an atmosphere or in a vacuum, if the plume is backlit by the sun, etc. But even the little RCS thrusters used to manoeuvre a vehicle like the Space Shuttle seem to show visible plumes, from the photos and videos I’ve seen. Recent video of the Boeing Starliner capsule departing the ISS, for example, clearly shows white jets puffing out from the craft’s RCS thrusters.
However, we don’t know what sort of future magic engines the 2001 pods would have used. Perhaps they used fuel that’s essentially invisible when burning. We never see any of the engines firing in the movie, even when the pod is moving. Conjecture: Maybe the special effects team weren’t able to get a convincing engine exhaust effect that satisfied Kubrick, so he decided not to show anything at all.
Incidentally you can see an EVA pod careening through space, flames bursting forth from its bottom rocket bell, in one of Robert McCall’s promotional paintings. In his painting the bell extends out beyond the bottom of the pod. The rocket plume is similar to the one in the dramatic painting he did of the Orion leaving Space Station V – a painting that was widely used for movie posters, novel and album art, etc.
We have no clear and high resolution references for the underside of the pods. Most views of the pods don't show the underside at all, or when they do, do so at oblique angles and in shadow. I know of no photos or film screenshots showing the undersides clearly. The full-sized pod blueprints of October 1965 contain details on the underside that were never built, such as recessed grab handles, and are not accurate to the final film.
One scene in the film where the underside is visible shows a featureless flat surface with a large circular hole in the centre. Sometimes model makers paint the underside of their pod models grey, to match what they see in the film. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s correct – I think the underside was white, like the rest of the pod, and merely appears darker on-screen because it’s in partial shadow.
Only one shot in the movie has more information, and it’s a view of the pod sailing diagonally across the screen from right to left, immediately after Bowman has sent Poole’s body spinning off into deep space. This view shows us the engraved lines of a large recessed rocket engine bell, and numerous small “greebly” details – boxes and pipes and whatnot. Since the other pod view has no greeblies at all, this is an obvious continuity error.
Unfortunately this shadowed view is the only information we have on these mystery details. And the image, even as a 70mm film scan, is too grainy to tell us what the greeblies really looked like.
The greeblies are also problematic from a logical point of view, because we know what the pod landing pads looked like. The pod bay had three circular waffle-tread black discs, and they were flat. There were no large recesses or whatever to accommodate protruding greeblies. Therefore none of the pod bay pods could have had greeblies. Similarly the alien hotel room scene features the pod flat against the floor, and greeblies would have prevented that. Unless they all magically pulled back into recesses, which seems improbable.
That said, the lack of anything on the underside does sort of conflict with the idea that the pods could land on a Jovian moon. There are no retractable landing gear or feet or anything like that. You'd want at least that, and some shock absorber legs as well.
Unknown.
There are two protruding white cylinders located to either side of the projecting step at the bottom rear of the pod. Each cylinder has two narrow slots on the interior flat surface. There's a continuity error in the film in that these internal slots are aligned horizontally in the interior scenes (the pod bay and the alien hotel) but they're aligned vertically in the space scenes.
Some people have theorized that they were meant to be rocket thrusters. However, doesn't work as a theory. Had they been engines, firing them would cause the whole pod to just spin crazily on its central axis. This is because the cylinders are located a long way away from the pod’s centre of gravity. In theory you could fire the two rear-facing rockets on the earmuffs to compensate for the spin tendency, but since those two rockets are already at the pod’s centre line, there’d be no point.
Other people have theorized that they were supposed to be exhaust pipes, but of course that makes no sense since the pod wouldn't contain any sort of internal combustion engine or anything that produced gaseous waste exhaust like that. That's atmospheric vehicle thinking!
There is lettering above each cylinder, but it's only partially legible. The first word is three letters long, and not known. The second word is definitely COUPLING. So is it possible that the pod designers imagined that these would be fuel coupling connectors or something like that? Maybe not – the first word is not FUEL. Or maybe they were intended as some sort of mechanical coupler device to grab the pod and pull it in? Though that doesn't align with photos of the pods coming into the pod bay window-first, and that they simply seem to be sitting on the round landing pad discs.
Moebius Models’ decision to include labels with their model kit, reading “VERNIER THRUSTERS,” is therefore incorrect.
Incidentally the 13.5" miniature of the pod seemed to have round holes on the inside of the cylinders, so I suspect they were attachment points to mount the pod for filming purposes.
There are three basic possibilities for the curvature of the oval-shaped window glass in the EVA pods. The windows could have been flat, they could have been curved around one axis (ie: a cylinder), or curved around two axes (ie: bulging like a segment of a sphere).
Reflections in the windows of the full-sized bay pods are key to solving this puzzle. They weren’t spherical, because we can see straight lines of overhead lights reflected in the glass in the pod bay scenes. You can't really see it in the movie, but behind the scenes photos taken in the pod bay reveal reflected details that are straight horizontally and squashed vertically.
Therefore the windows were slightly curved in one direction, as though the glass had been wrapped around a large diameter cylinder. In reality they probably just bent a sheet of thin acrylic plastic slightly.
The curvature of the interior set window seems to follow a similar design, judging by a photo taken by Douglas Trumbull.
There are a number of tiny complicated-looking objects glued to various places on the outside of the full-sized pods, particularly the front panel beneath the window, and on the arms and claws. A different set of objects is visible on the pod’s front panel during the close-up attack sequence.
These have mostly been identified as components from commercial plastic model kits commonly available in Britain in the 60s; mainly model railway kits. In Star Wars terminology these detail parts are known as “greeblies” though apparently the 2001 crew may have called them “wiggets”.
Specific 1960s model kits have been identified. The kits include:
Airfix SR-N1 H.D.L. Hovercraft 1/72 287
Airfix OO Travelling Crane 205
Airfix OO Girder Bridge 207
Airfix OO Locomotive Turntable
Airfix B-29 Superfortress 1/72 781
Airfix Bismarck F404S
Airfix Bristol Bloodhound 1/76
UPC “Honest John“ “atomic rocket launcher”
Renwal 1/200 Polaris submarine (I don’t know if it was the “George Washington” 651, the “Ethan Allen” 652, or the “Andrew Jackson” 654, or whether they’re all identical in terms of the parts used in 2001)
The closeup panel/continuity error also has its own parts, not seen elsewhere. These include:
Airfix C043 Prestwin Twin Silo Cement Wagon
Airfix Gemini 1/24
Airfix Refrigerator Van
Revell 1/24 Gemini
A number of these kits were identified by model maker Martin Bower (Alien) and now-VFX supervisor Lee Stringer (Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, etc). Some parts only appear on the full-sized pods, and some only appear on the superdetailed closeup front panel that was built.
This is not a complete list. There are a number of greeblies, particularly on the claws and arms and on the front panel, which have not been identified.
Interestingly the EVA pods had no crests, logos, or other branding. There was no big USAA logo, or a giant POD 1 graphic in Futura Heavy or Eurostile Bold. They’re all the same colours, and lack big stripes. There is no visual way to distinguish one pod from the other two.
However, the EVA pods are covered with tons of tiny detailed text in black lettering, much like the maintenance markings on contemporary aircraft.
The larger messages mostly have a meaning attached. The designers gave considerable thought about what each component and control was meant to do in the context of pod operation, and affixed a label accordingly. “MAN ARM REMOVAL” (ouch), “CAUTION LENS INSTALL”, “NOTICE USE ONLY GVC REPLACEMENT”, “DEST DETON INSTALL”, and so on. As noted later, the cockpit pushbuttons were also labelled with functional messages this way. The text was all set in Futura Bold, applied by hand using Letraset’s rub-down dry transfers.
However, the tiny blocks of long text were boilerplate. Some were actually chunks of recycled legalese about Letraset international patents taken from the original dry transfer sheets. Others were semi-garbled bits of text. But most isn’t legible at all in any photo or screenshot, so we’ll never know what it said on all blocks.
That’s a good question. There are some aspects of the two arms that were narratively pretty straightforward and obvious. Each arm could slide in or out on the rectangular metal beams, which could also rotate in their body sockets. Each arm had an “elbow” which permitted 90° bends of the upper arms.
But then there were two sub-arms to each arm, and I’m not sure what the point of that was. It seems that the fact that the sub-arms are both linked at the base really limits what they would have been able to do. They did give the ability to open up and catch murdered astronauts, I guess.
Each sub-arm was equipped with a hand or claw, consisting of three fingers (two with narrow flat pads) and a thumb (with a wider pad). The middle finger had no pad, so could presumably be used in situations where a bit more dexterity is required – at least, where the thumb’s wide pad wouldn’t get in the way. Each hand could rotate freely on the wrist mechanism; a capability exploited in the movie when Dave unlocks the airlock door. It’s not clear, incidentally, if this was done by having the hand free-rotate, with a stage hand turning the circular lock handle from behind the set. Or if the hand rotated itself - which it could do, since you see the hand rotate back into position as the arms move.
The bigger question is perhaps how the cylindrical “waldo” remote controllers were supposed to be able to operate the arms narratively. You've got this complex setup with several points of articulation and four separate claws, yet the controllers are just these cylinders with rotating ends and fingerholes. Presumably various buttons and whatnot were supposed to be inside the fingerholes.
The EVA pods had a ridged curved thing below the step, at the back of the pod. It looked very much like a roller door for a garage or a rolltop/tambour desk, and it appears that that’s exactly what it was! It’s specifically called out on the full-sized pod blueprints, which describe this door as a “probe locker”. Basically it was narratively a mini garage for space probes, but the idea was never explored in the finished film.
Conjecture: at one point, judging by surviving production paintings which show a giant rectangular slot in the side of a Jovian moon, there were plans on having Bowman’s space pod fly out and explore a moon. Launching a probe at that point would make sense. Indeed, one of the starboard control panels on the interior also had a group of pushbuttons labelled “PROBE JETTISON”.
There’s a small door panel or access hatch on the back of the pod, immediately to the starboard side of the main door. This flush panel is labelled “ELECT MOD INSP ACC”; presumably short for ”electrical module inspection access”.
It has a T-shaped handle that was actually a piece from the Airfix SR-N1 hovercraft kit; a piece also found on the 2001 moonbus, various background Thunderbirds TV show models, and the Jawa Sandcrawler model from Star Wars, incidentally!
The one thing I don’t get is why this hatch was on the starboard side, when that’s the side that the entry door rotates into. A door on the port side would have enabled a deeper void behind. But then maybe they saw it as something like a fusebox from a car, which wouldn't need much space behind it.
Beneath the hatch is a rectangular plate perforated by randomly spaced rectangular holes, sort of like an old computer punchcard. This plate is one of the interior floors from the Renwal Polaris submarine kit.
To the left side of the pods' doors you can see a silvery-grey handwheel and a recessed red object. Many people have assumed that the handwheel was an emergency door release mechanism, but the 4K scan of the film shows the writing on the pod back quite clearly in the alien hotel room scene. This view reveals that the text next to the wheel reads REACTANT CELL INSERT. There are lines indicating the open and closed positions of the wheel. So narratively speaking, a turn of the handwheel released the lock on the red object, which was meant to be a kind of pull-out fuel canister.
What further evidence is there that it was a fuel cell? Well, there are photos of the full-sized pods in the pod bay with a black void next to the handwheel, indicating that the red boxes were removable. In fact, you can see in the finished movie that when the astronauts go into the middle pod to plot against HAL, the pod has an empty red box socket. Maybe it was meant to be undergoing replenishment.
Behind the pod bay workbench you can see a row of nine red and white gas tanks. Beneath these tanks, close to floor level, are three slightly recessed panels. It's not visible in the film or in most photos of the bay, but two high-resolution shots of the bay interior reveal that these recessed panels were actually equipped with openings to accommodate the red boxes! And they had identical red boxes to those on the pod, showing that the designers intended that the boxes were some sort of fuel cell or something, with the wall panels part of a recharging or filling system. Some of the tanks have the text “NITRODYNE STORAGE” written beneath them; the fictitious fuel used by the pods. The blueprint for the pod bay marks these tanks as “FUEL DISPENSER UNITS 1, 2, 3”.
It's an interesting concept, but the red boxes do seem a bit small for fuel canisters. Perhaps they were supposed to be long boxes that inserted into deep slots. But if they did then they'd impinge on the pressure sphere that presumably formed the cockpit interior. You'd think the fuel cells would go into the angular base of the pod or something. Or maybe they were thinking of a situation like a fossil fuel powered car, which has both a fuel tank and a battery. This might be a small fuel cell for electrical functions on the pod, and the rocket fuel was stored elsewhere.
Incidentally, the October 1965 blueprints for the pod, which represent an in-progress and non-finalized design, have a panel marked “SOLID FUEL CONTAINER”. This is a kind of hatch on the side of the pod towards the front, and the top elevation shows a dotted line indicating that the fuel container was a long rectangular box that slotted deep into the pod. This was never built into the final pod design, but I conjecture that the basic concept switched over to the box on the back of the pod.
The “earmuffs” were the projecting flat-topped cones with rounded protrusions located on the sides of the pod. They’re labelled “ENGINE COVERS” on the in-progress October 1965 blueprints. Each earmuff, both port and starboard, was identical across all the full-sized pods. It looks like they made a single fibreglass mould, then cast all of the earmuffs from it.
However, the port earmuffs for each pod were simply rotated 180° from the opposite side. (ie: the earmuffs were neither mirrored nor handed) That way both sides had the narrow recess in the front; albeit at different heights from the centre line. It also means each earmuff recess was identical in shape and size, but not in location relative to the centre of the pod.
The earmuff recesses were filled with nothing more exotic than off-the-shelf model kit sprues: ie, kit parts still attached to their injection-moulding runners! Most sprues were medium grey in colour, though some details were painted white, and the centre of the low cylinder/disc part on the port earmuff was painted red on the inside. The sprues are often incorrectly depicted as all red.
The port-side pod in the bay even has parts of its starboard earmuff recess out of alignment! One of the model kit sprues got bumped, and a bunch of the parts are bent on their narrow runners, rather than being all horizontal.
I’ve also been able to confirm by examining the high-resolution photos taken by Keith Hamshere that the two earmuff recesses contain parts mostly from the Renwal Polaris submarine and Airfix B-29 model kits. The tree-like sprues are mostly from the Renwal Polaris, and the oval details are from the Airfix B-29. The large rectangular plate with the big round detail (the red circle) is from the Airfix model railway travelling crane.
There’s a moment, when the EVA pod rotates to enable Dave to enter the Discovery’s airlock, that briefly seems to show a light in one of the earmuff recesses. However, that’s actually a burst of lens flare – there were never any lamps inside the recesses at all.
They weren’t automotive headlights: they were much too big in diameter for that. The four headlamps on the original full-sized pods appear to have used bulbs from aircraft landing lights – the kind seen on a plane’s landing gear. The bulbs look like tungsten filament sealed beams, PAR 64 or 8" in diameter, with clear/non-fresnel lenses. Something along the lines of GE 4559 bulbs.
Interestingly you can see in the film that the lower two lights are brighter, slightly pinkish in tone, and power up first, whereas the upper two lights are dimmer, slightly yellow in tone, and power up a split second later. No idea why that's the case, but you can see it both in the space scenes and in the pod bay scenes.
The bulbs all seem the same visually in the photos, but even the best photos don't show the exact configuration of the filaments. Perhaps they used different wattage bulbs. But if that were the case you'd think the brighter bulbs would have taken longer to power on and reach full brightness. Maybe they were driven by two different transformers for some reason?
They were a later addition, incidentally. The October 1965 blueprints have no headlights on them at all. The maquette model has spots for them, however.
The pod has a series of handgrips around its body. They're circular depressions with curved handles running across them. Of note is that the grips, including the assymetrical one next to the door, are one of the few parts of the entire EVA pod design made of compound curves. Almost every other aspect to the pod is made of simple geometric primitives: spheres, cones, cylinders, cubes.
Narratively they were grips to allow an astronaut, floating in space, to grab onto the pod while doing stuff outside. However, logically a raised bar would make more sense, since you can clip umbilicals to them, and they give you a longer stretch of handle to grab onto. Such bars are seen on real space machinery, such as the International Space Station.
The grip by the door was of course designed to make it easier for the astronauts to enter the pod. Arguably this is one of the technical errors in the film – in real life people would just float around, pushing off various surfaces, as they do on actual space stations. They wouldn't walk around on velcro floors, and need a handgrip to hoist themselves up into the pod. But 2001 was filmed under Earth gravity, and before space stations existed, so we need to cut them some slack in that regard.
However, the lower handgrips were clearly used by stagehands to move the pod bay pods around on the stage. Close examination of photos shows a slight yellowing and dirt to the handle area; a faint staining not seen elsewhere on the pod.
Conjecture: I would imagine that they also had a steel rod or something running through them for strength.
Unknown.
Some people have theorized that it was a door pivot, but that seems unnecessary to me. The door simply rotated on two tracks – one at the top and one at the bottom, as clearly shown in photos taken by Douglas Trumbull. Each track described a partial arc for the door to follow.
The October 1965 blueprints don't have this flat disc, but just a fairly featureless top surface circumscribed by a circle. Conjecture: there's also text reading “RADAR COVER DIFFERENT CHECK”, so perhaps the flat disc was thought of as a small radar dome.
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