EVA Pod Research II: Variants and Interiors

The exact number is not known with certainty. Pretty well any movie will involve the construction of many props, sets, and models for various purposes and scenes. It’s normal for multiple things to represent a single narrative object in the film, which frequently results in continuity errors. Even in a film as meticulously assembled as 2001.

We know that:

Three full-sized pods were built for the pod bay interior set. According to Douglas Trumbull two of the pods had a mocked-up and illuminated interior set, though only the middle pod has a visible interior in the film. These pod bay interiors were small and not used for filming the pod interior scenes. These pods had silver front camera eyes.
One full-sized pod was equipped with mechanical servo and cable-operated arms and claws and used for most of the space scenes. This pod had a black HAL front camera eye. I believe that this mechanized pod was, in fact, the starboard pod bay pod, rebuilt. This is because there are two specific blemishes on the flat starboard side of the pod – one near the lower starboard headlight, and one further back by the earmuff. And these small blemishes on the arm-equipped pod match one of the pod bay pods.
One full-sized pod was used for the emergency decompression scene. It has almost the same mocked-up interior set as the middle pod bay pod, and therefore is presumed to be that pod repurposed (rather than a new one built for the scene) It is not the same pod that had working mechanical arms, because the interior of that pod was filled with equipment. I say almost the same because this interior has waldo controllers under the dash, whereas the pod bay pod did not.
A pod was used for spaceflight: ie, scenes where the pod is seen flying through the blackness of space. This pod has the black HAL camera eye rather than the silver tube cameras on the pod bay pods. I think it's possible this was the servo-equipped pod in most shots.
One full-sized cockpit interior set was built for filming the scenes of the astronauts operating the controls to pilot the craft around, and also for the plotting against HAL scene. This cockpit set was larger in diameter than the interior of the pod bay pods. This set was an interior only and had almost no exterior (no arms, no white-painted sphere, etc) other than a scribed recess around the window area. It had removable wall and ceiling panels to accommodate the camera, and was temporarily installed in the pod bay set for filming the plotting scene.
One 13.5" miniature was built for exterior scenes. This pod is described as being various sizes, with 13" being common, but I'm going with 13.5" because that's what the blueprint specified. It was scaled to match the large Discovery model.
One 3" miniature was built for exterior scenes. It was scaled to match the smaller Discovery model.

How many full-sized pods were used for the spaceflight scenes?

This is not known for certain, but I believe probably just one full-sized pod. It's complicated.

I’m not counting the airlock scene as “spaceflight” for the purpose of this discussion. That scene (when viewed from inside the airlock) was filmed using one of the pod bay pods that had a mocked-up interior, as mentioned above. The bit preceding it, showing the exterior of the airlock, used the spaceflight pod, of course.
The shots of the pods zooming towards the camera are flat images, animated. There is no change in perspective to the pods as they approach the camera, as would be the case if an actual model had been filmed for the sequences. The pods are quite detailed in the shots, suggesting they were photos of full-sized pods and not the 13.5" miniature. The pod in these shots had a grey block, a HAL lens, and no red and black curved lines on the front panel.
One shot shows a full-sized pod, stationary parked arms, no grey block, a HAL lens, red and black lines in an arc around the lens dish, and a greebled underside.
One shot shows a full-sized pod, stationary extended arms, no grey block, a HAL lens, no red and black arc lines, and a plain underside.
Two shots show a full-sized pod, moving arms, no grey block, a HAL lens, and red and black arc lines, but the underside can't be seen.
One shot shows a full-sized pod, moving arms, no grey block, a HAL lens, no red and black arc lines, but the underside can't be seen.

So what does this whole mess tell us?

We know that just one full-sized pod was equipped with servo motors, cables, and other technical jiggerypokery to enable the arms and claws to operate. This is based on statements by Douglas Trumbull, and on the assumption that building two pods with operating arms would be needlessly expensive. Photos of this pod interior are included in Adam Johnson's book 2001: the Lost Science. The pod with motorized arms was used for both the murder scene and the Discovery hatch opening scene. The remaining full-sized pods therefore had static arms in the upright, parked, position.
It seems unlikely to me that they would have built two pods with extendable, adjustable, but unmotorized, arms. Therefore it seems more likely that the two variations we see on the spaceflight pod – the red and black arc lines, and the underside greeblies – mean that these two specific details were added to the single spaceflight pod partway during the course of filming for some reason.
The other possibility is that two spaceflight pods were built, with different sets of details. This is possible, and would mean that all three pod bay pods were rebuilt for space scene use. (the third being the one with the mocked-up interior) It seems an unnecessary expense, but two separate full-sized pods would explain why one has the underside greeblies and one does not, though it obviously doesn't explain why they added the greeblies.

The shots of a pod hovering close the Discovery, or resting on the extendable pod bay platform (the “egress arm”), may have used miniature pods. There was an external Discovery wall and pod bay door built full-sized, but I'm not sure it was used in the final cut of the film. Still images survive showing that it was built, however.

How big were the full-sized pods?

Good question. Different data points exist.

In the March 1970 issue of Spaceflight magazine Frederick Ordway described the pods as being 7 feet in diameter. (ie: 84" or 2.13m) The pods were designed such that the diameter of the pod is the same as the height – the pod is conceptually a pressure sphere nestled inside a polygonal cradle assembly and bracketed by the conical earmuffs. All dimensions were in Imperial measurements because Britain, where the film was made in the mid 1960s, had not yet converted to metric.

Unfortunately the surviving in-progress full-sized pod blueprints published in 2001: the Lost Science don’t appear to have the overall height marked on them. But they do mention that a 1:6 model would be 15 3/16" in size, which would equate to a full-sized pod of 91 1/8": quite a bit bigger! That seems wrong, as the pods in the pod bay do not look like they're 7' 7 1/8" tall. There are a few markings on these non-final blueprints, and through inference it's possible to deduce that the pod was supposed to be 6' 8" or 80".

A surviving pod bay set blueprint has outlines showing where the pods go. Based on the stated door diameter of 10', these pod outlines appear to be 7' in diameter. Ceiling height of the bay is indicated as 8'. This blueprint is not the final design of the pod bay, so this isn't definitive for the pod size.

The surviving blueprint of the miniature states that it's 13.5" or 343mm tall, and it's presumed that this is a 1:6 model. That would yield a full-sized pod height of 81" or 6' 9" or 2.06m. It's worth noting that the miniature blueprint more closely resembles the finished pods than the surviving full-sized blueprints, and therefore was probably drawn closer to the time of actual pod construction.

In terms of on-screen information, the film shows footage of Keir Dullea standing right next to a pod in the bay. He's apparently 5' 11" or 71" tall, which would seemingly make the pod something in its high 70s in height. It definitely doesn't look like a full 7 feet.

So. Given the data we have, I think the 81" / 6' 9" / 2057mm value is reasonable, and Ordway was probably just rounding up by 3 inches.

The pod interiors

Could the cockpit interior have actually fit inside a pod exterior?

No.

This answer is pretty long, since there was some confusion over this point in the 2001 fan world for some time.

We basically see the interior of the space pods in two different contexts in the movie. First, we can catch glimpses of a pod’s interior through an open pod door a) in the pod bay set, and b) very briefly once Bowman has blown himself into the Discovery airlock. Second, we see footage of the astronauts sitting inside a fully kitted-out pod cockpit, surrounded by glowing buttons and displays.

These were actually separate sets. Either one or two of the full-sized pods had a simplified mocked-up interior set installed within. (there’s only visual evidence of one mock-up interior being built, but Douglas Trumbull said that there were two) And then the cockpit interior was built as a completely separate standalone set, with no white spherical exterior to it.

This interior cockpit, with all the individual backlit pushbuttons and animated displays, was constructed by Hawker Siddeley Dynamics and filmed on Elstree soundstages. In other words, the detailed cockpit was not physically built inside any of the three full-sized pods used in the pod bay scene. Instead, two of the pod bay pods had smaller mocked-up interiors.

The key point is that the interior cockpit set, used for the piloting scenes, was too big to fit into any of the pods seen in the pod bay set.

Think of the Shining's Overlook Hotel, or the Millennium Falcon hold and cockpit, or a house in any TV sitcom. These are all cases where the filmmakers decided to make a larger interior set that could never have fit into the exterior set.

The best-known evidence comes from close examination of the pod bay footage from the finished movie. When you see the astronauts climbing into the middle pod you can see parts of the mocked-up interior’s control panels. But the angles of this mocked-up interior’s panels don't actually correspond to those in the cockpit interior set. The panel sizes also don't match: entire rows of illuminated buttons were eliminated from the pod bay interior set in order to cram the panels in there, and the hand controller looks larger than it does in the cockpit set. (because the cockpit set is larger and the hand controllers are the same size) Documentary film footage of 2001 in production shows carpenters working on a space pod interior, and this is that rudimentary in-pod interior.

More recently additional behind the scenes photos have come to light, providing additional hard evidence. For example, in July 2024 a number of photographs by Douglas Trumbull went up for auction. A handful of pictures, showing the pod bay plotting scene being filmed, demonstrate this point about sizing. The middle pod was removed and the detailed cockpit set was forklifted into the pod bay set in order to film the lipreading scene. That way they could film the cockpit interior while looking out at the HAL faceplate in the pod bay. They did the same thing for the alien hotel room – they transferred the cockpit set to the alien set so they could film a brief view of the room from inside the pod.

In these photos the exterior shell of the cockpit interior set looks like it was about the same size as one of the exterior pods. But since that interior is supposed to fit inside an exterior pod shell, the interior set is thus clearly too big. Remember that there has to be enough space between the outside of the interior set and the inner surface of the exterior pod shell to accommodate the recessed window and the sort of tunnel area leading to the door.

This issue clearly affects the openings of the pod. The glazed area of the window looks fairly big from the outside, but proportionally smaller on the cockpit set, since the windowframe was the same absolute size between the two. (they may have used the same fibreglass mould to cast the windowframe assembly as the windows used in the full-sized pods) And the door sizes similarly don’t match, though this is less visually obvious.

A couple other known photos show the cockpit interior set from the outside. One, I believe unpublished, is in the Kubrick Archives. Much of the detail is unfortunately obscured by a man (camera operator Kelvin Pike I believe) holding a light meter, and the image quality is limited because it's a 35mm contact print, but you can clearly see where the various “floating” or “wild” walls could be removed from the set, thereby exposing the interior to the camera. This is more evidence of a separate cockpit set – they couldn’t have filmed the cockpit interior from the side or top without being able to open up the set, and you couldn’t remove walls from a pod that was enclosed in a seamless white fibreglass shell!

The photo shows that the panels were probably 3/4" sheet plywood with 1x2 joiner blocks. The domed ceiling and vent arch look like fibreglass. The control panels were backed with a mass of rectangular plastic boxes containing the pushbutton switch mechanisms, each festooned with loops of wire to power the tiny incandescent light bulbs. Vertical baffles for separating the two side-mounted displays can be seen, and there appears to be an open footwell at the bottom front for the actors’ feet.

The other photos are on a Douglas Trumbull contact sheet auctioned in August 2024, and show more of the exterior and upper shell components, including the sides of the vestibule leading to the door. These photos were taken while Kubrick was filming the pod interior from the open back door – probably the astronaut conversation scene, since other photos show Dullea and Lockwood standing around, waiting.

Incidentally, this interior/exterior size mismatch is a problem for model makers, who often want to build an interior set into their EVA pod models. You basically have to crunch the interior set down in scale to get it to fit into the exterior pod. Effectively the interior and exterior will be at different scales. But even if you do this you’ll have problems with the aforementioned door and window sizes. It’s impossible to reconcile the scale issues and you just have to fudge it by deviating from the appearance of the sets in the movie. You also can't simply scale down the size of the cockpit set, since the proportions and relationships between parts of the two sets are also different.

Which interior is visible in which scene?

So, for completeness, here we go. This trivia is mostly useful for people making models of the EVA pod.

The mocked-up pod interior:

All scenes showing the outside of the pods while they're parked in the pod bay show glimpses of the mocked-up pod interior. The only mocked-up interior that we see is the middle pod's, because it's only visible with a) the door open, or b) the interior lights on.
The best view we get of the mocked-up interior is when the two astronauts climb inside the pod – just before Poole enters. You can clearly see how there are fewer pushbuttons on the panels than in the cockpit interior set. The two waldo controllers are also absent.
The scene where the pod door is shown closing, revealing the EXPLOSIVE BOLTS message, briefly shows the mocked-up interior. The interior grab handles on the walls are in a different position in this view than in the cockpit set.
The scene when the pod spins around to face HAL, with both astronauts inside, briefly shows a couple of mocked-up interior panels.
Promotional photos exist showing Dullea/Bowman inside one of the pods, looking out at the camera. Another couple of promo shots show both actors inside, as seen through the front window. You can see the mocked-up interior in these photos. Aside from the proportions, the metal cover over the explosive bolt trigger device has black circles painted on it; the cockpit interior set cover does not.
Behind the scenes photos exist showing Dullea sitting inside the mocked-up interior of the middle pod as its landing pad (egress arm) retracts into the pod bay. This footage is not included in the final film.
The scene where Bowman transfers to the Discovery via the airlock briefly shows the mocked-up pod interior. The filmmakers positioned a pod with a missing door above the airlock set, and lowered Keir Dullea down into the airlock on a cable. This interior does have the waldo controllers, though they're painted differently from the cockpit interior set.

The cockpit interior set:

All shots where the cockpit displays are lit up and showing animations. This includes all scenes of the astronauts piloting the pod.
All scenes involving closeups on the astronauts' faces, where the glowing pushbuttons are reflected in the helmet faceplates. (and also scenes where control panel screens are projected onto their faces)
The closeup shot of Bowman’s hand flicking off the row of audio communications switches. (whether that was Keir Dullea's hand or a stand-in's, I don't know)
The scene with the two astronauts inside the pod, talking to each other. This required the mocked-up interior to be lifted into the pod bay set so you can see the bay outside the window. Filming most of these scenes required sticking the camera through the back door, since the black padding of the pod interior vestibule is visible.
The telephoto shot where the camera pans back and forth between the astronauts' mouths, for the silent lip-reading scene, was filmed with the actors sitting inside the cockpit interior. It was actually filmed as a pull-out zoom, where the camera's view pulls back to reveal the inner part of the pod windowframe, but that part of the sequence was cut.
The scene where Bowman prepares to exit the pod. This includes the view of him turning around, pressing the various pushbuttons, and then the reverse shot where he faces the camera in preparation to being blown out the door.
The arrival scene in the alien hotel room, where you can see a view out the cockpit window, and the scene a moment later where you can see Bowman standing in the room. The screens are working, displaying the text NON FUNCTION, also showing that the cockpit interior set was used.
Polaroid lighting test photos exist showing Bowman inside the pod in the alien hotel room, facing forward. If this scene was filmed it was never used in the film. This also required the cockpit interior set to be moved into the alien hotel room set.

Where, narratively, was the cabin camera?

There's a brief shot in the film of Bowman monitoring Poole as he pilots the pod. The view is shown on one of the Discovery's cockpit displays. And Frederick Ordway said, “Normally, the TV link would be occupied by the internal camera, so that the parent craft can monitor the pod interior.”

However, the pod has no obvious camera in the interior set. The view of Poole in the pod would have had to have been shot by a video camera located over his left shoulder. And there isn't anything remotely camera-like there, in any of the footage or photos of the interior set.

That brief moment was obviously filmed in real life by a camera located outside the pod interior, shooting through a hole made by shifting a removable “floating” wall section. However, no attempt was made to explain the camera's location narratively.

Could the EVA pods monitor the Discovery?

According to the panel buttons, yes probably, from a narrative perspective. There are buttons labelled PB, CN.

Conjecture: Given the proximity of these buttons to the video functions, it seems likely that these were meant to permit the pilot to send video feeds from cameras in the pod bay and centrifuge to the EVA pod's displays. This capability was not shown in the film.

How were the interior panels made?

The set builders constructed them on an engineered wood substrate. According to surviving blueprints published in Adam Johnson’s book 2001: the Lost Science, the Discovery interior walls used 3/4" “blockboard” panels, which are glued wooden blocks faced with thin high-quality plywood veneers. The mocked-up pod interiors also used the same material, judging by 16mm documentary film footage showing them being built. Blockboard is lighter than plywood and more suited for vertical surfaces, though not as common today as it was in the 1960s. (and the stuff is not common at all in North America) The interior cockpit set may have used plywood instead of blockboard, judging by one surviving photo.

One of the large Discovery panel blueprints in Johnson has the note “FORMICA SURFACE HAS ALUMINIUM BACKING TO HELP SUPPORT PRACTICAL BUTTONS”. One photo of the cockpit set doesn't seem to show any such aluminium backing, perhaps because the EVA pod panels were much smaller than the Discovery panels.

They then glued thin Formica-brand laminate sheets over top of the blockboard or plywood. These thin sheets were made from layers of paper, impregnated with melamine resin, and topped with a smooth or subtly textured plastic surface. The stuff used for café tables and inexpensive kitchen countertops/work surfaces, basically. The specific thickness is not marked on the blueprints, but is presumed to be 3/64" (1.2mm) or so. The EVA pod panels were brushed satin black.

The padded wall sections (black inside the EVA pod; white inside the Discovery) were marked on the blueprints as “leathercloth & foam infill padding” on a 1/4" plywood base. Leathercloth was an old British name for textured flexible plastic backed with cotton. Basically a type of faux leather, which is now vinyl/PVC or polyurethane based and sometimes called leatherette, naugahyde, or pleather. A behind the scenes photo reveals that the leathercloth was held in place using rounded-head tacks on the underside. Not particularly high tech!

Illuminated panels were opal or translucent white Perspex 030, which is a gloss acrylic plastic sheet. Americans will be more familiar with the Plexiglas brand name, which is basically the same thing. Blue buttons used Perspex blue 725 (similar to Perspex blue 727 sold today), and light yellow Perspex 250 (similar to yellow 260 or 2252).

The curved interior walls are presumed to have been made from fibreglass.

Did they have actual flat panel displays?

Not as such. But most of the displays weren't superimposed optically, either. It was mainly done through on-set trickery: realtime and in-camera at the time of filming. (ie: if you had been there looking at the cockpit set in 1966 you'd have seen the images appearing on the displays before your very eyes)

Obviously there were no flat panel displays, or any kind of high-resolution electronic video screens with flat surfaces, back in the 1960s. So the movie's flat displays were ingeniously simulated using film.

The different spaceship sets had flat screens, probably frosted glass, built into them, and 16mm movie projectors were hidden on the undersides or backs as required. Pre-filmed animation sequences were then projected onto the screens. This made shooting the various futuristic sets quite time-consuming. The 16mm reels of “display” film could only hold so much footage, and had to be rewound between takes. Amusingly one of the film reels used in the EVA pods got scratched, and you can see a greenish film scratch flash up on one of the EVA pod screens in the actual film if you look carefully.

Most of the Discovery displays were done the same way. For scenes such as the chess game (and the pentominoes game that was filmed but cut) and the AE-35 test scene, the prefilmed display shots were projected and the actors had to synchronize their moves to them. For the IBM Newspad scene the production crew had to align the projections carefully with the rectangular holes cut into the table top, corresponding to prop pads placed at angles as if the astronauts had just casually put them there.

The display footage was mostly hand-animated by Douglas Trumbull, with other people such as artist Roy Naisbitt working on the graphics. The 16mm projectors were operated by Brian Johnson and others.

Note that the mocked-up pod interiors did not have working displays – only the cockpit interior set did. It would have been rather difficult to get 16mm projectors working inside the fibreglass pod sphere, for one thing.

Although most of the displays used real-time projections, there are a couple of brief moments in the Discovery footage and during the moonbus landing where you see optically superimposed display effects rather than in-camera effects. Conjecture: there were a couple scenes in the film like this, apparently because narrative changes were decided in post-production, long after the original footage had been filmed.

The non-Kubrick sequel 2010: the Year We Make Contact, incidentally, used ugly bulbous glass CRT monitors for its displays, because they were much cheaper to implement than labour-intensive film, even though they looked like crap. Kubrick, way back in the 60s, had been told by his technical advisors that flat panel technology would one day be possible, so he went for the film-based solution.

Were all the buttons actually labelled?

Yes (almost).

All but two of the pushbuttons and other controls inside the pod cockpit had carefully devised labels. Each one represented a specific function or feature, and sets of buttons were grouped thematically. They therefore had text like “AMP”, “AUTO”, “PWR DIST”, and so on.

As Frederick Ordway put it, “We insisted on knowing the purpose and functioning of each assembly and component, down to the logical labeling of individual buttons and the presentation on screens of plausible operating, diagnostic and other data.”

The labour involved in this is crazy. Remember that each letter had to be rubbed down manually, from Letraset dry transfer sheets, one by one. They had to be all lined up on the same baseline, and the text also had to be properly centre-aligned on each button. The blueprints identify the Letraset letters as Futura Bold 8 point.

High-resolution photographs of the pod interior set, taken by Keith Hamshere, exist in the Kubrick Archives. From this it's possible to read some 80% of the pushbutton text clearly. A few areas, such as the buttons on the left “eyebrow” panel, are not documented in known high-rez photos and remain a mystery.

Two blue square buttons on the top rear starboard side appear never to have been labelled, for reasons unknown. Was that intentional? I'd guess it was a mistake.

How many blinking lights did the EVA pod panels have?

One. Basically.

The sole flashing light with clear intention appears inside the EVA pod when Bowman arms the door’s explosive bolts. And that red lamp starts blinking only when the dangerous explosive sequence is activated and the low farting noise starts to sound as a warning. The light, incidentally, was labelled DISCON in behind the scenes photos taken before filming, but in the actual movie the light reads ARMED, which obviously makes more sense.

People often think there are Blinkenlights all over, but there weren’t, really. It's no lame-ass Batcomputer with rows of Christmas lights flashing randomly away. The panel lights were all pushbuttons which (almost all) lit or went dark only in response to a physical press. The movement in the pod scenes comes almost entirely from the animated video displays.

This is, of course, what you'd want in a real user interface. Perhaps not the overly busy displays, but lights should not flash unless there's a genuinely important reason for the operator to look at them.

Now. Having said that, there is one pushbutton light which does change during the course of the film. This is a single-bulb square button on the left/port side of the pod, next to the second display monitor. It illuminates white, then blinks briefly, then goes out.

Was this intentional? Was it a bad connection inside the light socket? (there are several two-bulb buttons where one lamp has burnt out or has become disconnected) I do not know.

Were the pod interiors red?

Yes, but not scarlet.

The upper interior walls of the pod were painted a uniform brick-red, almost oxblood red, colour. They may well have used red oxide primer paint. This coloration is clearly shown in behind the scenes photos.

However, the pod interior also had internal lights located behind white opal plastic panels. These lights contained red bulbs, casting a reddish submarine-like glow to the interior, so in the film the insides do look pretty red.

Narratively this design was presumably intended to help the astronauts with their night/low-light vision. Which might make sense. After all, if the Discovery was around Mars' distance from the Sun it'd have a bit less than half the light hitting it than it would at Earth's orbit. But by the time it reached Jupiter it'd receive only about 4% of the light that hits Earth.

What were the hand controllers?

There are two pairs of different types of hand controllers inside the EVA pod.

The large champagne gold cylinders with black rod-like handles, located underneath the front control panel, were the “waldo” controllers. These were narratively supposed to allow the astronaut to operate the external arms and claws. These are only seen in the EVA pod interior.

There were also two black-painted controllers on the top of the front panel for flying the pod around. Each controller was shaped roughly like a human hand, and mounted on a stem going into a recessed ball. The same controllers can be seen in the Orion and Aries cockpit sets. (which also had a second, vertical, hand controller taken from a British military airplane)

For more information on the EVA pod hand controllers, check out my page on the subject.

What was the explosive bolts controller?

The anodized green pushbutton device for triggering the back door's explosive bolts is one of the few obvious “found” objects in the EVA pod set. It's actually not a pushbutton device at all, but part of a personal equipment connector (PEC) from a Martin Baker ejection seat for a fighter plane. The round “buttons” that Dullea pushes are thus actually air hose connectors, and not originally pushbuttons at all.

Where did the explosive bolts pushbutton cover go?

During the escape sequence Bowman removes a machined aluminium cover that's clipped onto the explosive bolt mechanism. A logical thing in a real zero-G spacecraft would have been to build a hinge into the cover so it doesn't float around and get in the way. Instead he seems to lower his hand to stow it.

The set actually had a flat four-sided surface, with an angled back edge, located just down there. (ie: the thing was square with one angled side lopped off) It appears to be the lid for a stowage container, though you don't see it properly in the film. However you just can catch a glimpse of the lid flipping down, accompanied by a little click sound, after Bowman puts the bolt cover down into it.

What are all the greeblies?

The pod interior is equipped with various boxy devices, fastened to the inner sphere and linked by hoses and pipes, all painted maroon-red to match the walls. I don't believe any of these boxes have been identified, but they definitely look like found objects. They mostly seem to be hydraulic valve mechanisms, or small hydraulic pumps. Incidentally many of the greeblies positioned on the pod bay’s round landing pads are similar devices, painted black.

The lower front wall, by the pilot's knees, has a small random-looking squareish detail as well. This looks like an aluminium heatsink with various electronic components and bits of wire fastened to it. It's not connected to anything else by wires or pipes, is mostly painted maroon red, and isn't visible in the finished film.

There's one internal grab bar on the rear ceiling. This is perhaps the bar installed at actor Gary Lockwood's suggestion, as he found entering the pod interior set to be difficult. This bar is painted black, but is otherwise identical to the silver/bare steel grab bars seen in the Discovery cockpit set. (one behind each headrest on the chair assemblies, and two on the walls flanking the entry door) Incidentally these bars are not circular in cross section, but pill or stadium shaped (ie: semicircular on the ends, but with longer parallel sides).

Was the door interior illuminated?

No. The door did not have internal lighting. There was a spotlight set up to shine on the red panel reading CAUTION EXPLOSIVE BOLTS during part of the filming, but that lamp was only positioned there, out of frame, for that scene. The red panel itself did not have any interior backlighting – people have been fooled by that external spotlight.

Above the red panel is a small metal flip panel with a couple of red pushbuttons. These are never seen lit in the film, though they look like the same type of acrylic pushbuttons seen on the normal control panels.

The small red and yellow panel beneath the red panel did have a recessed area with a greyish surface. This is never seen illuminated in the finished film, but a continuity Polaroid exists showing numbers glowing on this tiny grey panel. It was therefore a countdown timer for the explosive bolts, and was created by projecting animated numbers from behind, using a 16mm projector. However this didn't make the final film.

Was there a pilot seat?

The seating area of the cockpit set is never properly seen – either in the film or in known behind the scenes photos. The only view we get is a glimpse of the mocked-up pod bay interior set. This shows a featureless black area for the pilot's bum; some sort of padded fake-leather banquette. There is no back or neck support of any kind visible – not even some sort of flip-out or retractable back.

No photos exist, that I know of, showing what the cockpit interior set had for a seat. Most photos have actors inconveniently seated within the crowded tiny set, making it impossible to see what they're sitting on.

That said, there is a clear continuity difference between the pod bay mockup and the cockpit interior set. The mockup appears to have a straight dividing line between the ribbed rubber floor of the cockpit vestibule and the seat area. However, two of the Hamshere interior cockpit set photos show that the floor had a curvature to it matching the curve of the door track. The cushion, if there was one, would have been below the floor line of the ribbed rubber.

Incidentally one behind the scenes photo of the cockpit set shows a blue rectangular object right behind Keir Dullea's back. This was actually a vinyl flight bag; the branded kind that airlines would provide or sell to passengers in the 1950s and 60s. It was blue with white piping, so possibly Pan-Am.

Who knows what the bag was doing there? Maybe it contained snacks for Dullea to nibble on during long shoots – it was while he was filming a scene with the back door closed but his helmet and gloves off (ie: the attempt to rescue Frank scene). It doesn't look like anything that could have served as much of a back support.

Were there seatbelts?

Narratively, there must have been. In real life in the movie set? Unknown.

It would have been problematic to fly something like an EVA pod without some form of pilot restraint. You'd have a lot of difficulty staying in your seat while the craft is changing speed or direction at any real speed, simply because of the law of conservation of momentum. Especially when the pod is outside the influence of planetary gravity.

There are different types of seatbelts, generally described by the number of points where the belts attach to the vehicle.

Two-point belts are the simple lap belts or waist belts for passengers on commercial airliners, and the back seats of older cars.
Cars normally have three-point belts for front seats: one diagonal shoulder strap across the chest, and a lap belt.
Four-point belts are the kind with two vertical shoulder straps and one waistbelt, the kind used by flight attendants in civilian aircraft. These are most commonly seen in the special fold-out jumpseats that flight attendants use during takeoff and landing.
Pilots and race car drivers normally have five-point belts, which are four-point restraints plus an extra strap that goes between the legs to prevent the wearer from sliding forward. Some race car drivers use six-point belts, which have two crotch straps.

Now, the movie clearly shows Dave Bowman reaching down to unfasten himself, just before being blowing himself out of the pod into the Discovery airlock. However, the belts or clips are not visible in film footage, and indeed are not seen in any known behind the scenes photo.

It's therefore not known if Keir Dullea was simply miming the action of unclipping a belt, or if an actual belt was present in the cockpit set, just out of frame. You can definitely hear three separate metallic clicking noises when Dullea performs these gestures and turns around, so either it was added as a sound effect in foley or there really was a seatbelt there. The fact you can hear two more metallic clicks as he turns, as if a loose seatbelt falls off his lap and hits the side panel of the set, suggests there might have been an actual belt present during filming.

That said, he does sort of reach down three times, as though he were unfastening buckles that were attached to his hips, and not to a waist belt at all. Perhaps that's what they had in mind? After all, the 2001 suits have diagonal grey straps running from the waist to the crotch when worn. Though how a clip would be meant to attach to a simple flat strap I don't know.

Interestingly all other vehicles in the film had visible seatbelts. You can see a four-point belt worn by Heywood Floyd on the Orion spaceplane, two-point belts worn by the Orion pilots (strangely, since you'd think five-point belts would have been required for any vehicle capable of atmospheric flight), two-points by Heywood Floyd and the flight attendant in the space station elevator, two-points by Floyd and the flight attendants on the Aries 1B moon shuttle, four-points by the pilots of the Aries, four-points (presumably; we never see the front view) by the pilots of the moonbus, and two-points by the Discovery crew in the ship cockpit.

Amusingly the Orion doesn't have enough seatbelts to go round. While most of the seats visible in shot have four-point belts attached to the seats, some don't, such as the one on the left side of the frame when Floyd is sleeping but the floating pen is motionless. Behind the scenes photos also show that seats further back in the set lack belts.

But getting back to the EVA pod, there isn't anywhere obvious that a proper multipoint restraining harness could go – there's nowhere for the shoulder straps to fasten.

EVA Pod Research I: Exteriors

EVA Pod Research II: Variants and Interiors

EVA Pod Research III: Action, Trivia, and References

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