EVA Pod Trivia

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.

What were the pods?

The EVA pods were small fictional spacecraft, supposedly equipped with basic life support and propulsion systems, that would allow a single pilot to travel in open space for relatively short distances. They were devised by the makers of 2001 as a plot device to get one of the astronauts outside the main Discovery ship, 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.

By necessity an FAQ like this 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 props – what they were supposed to do and and how they'd operate in the context of the fiction. I've mostly avoided conjecture and guesswork, but when I have offered some possible theories to explain specific points, I've clearly marked them as conjectural. I've also indicated when I'm talking about narrative story elements.

Who designed the pods?

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 undoubtedly contributed to the pod design as well.


The pod exteriors

Where is the HAL eye?

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, but the space scenes show a pod with a black and red HAL 9000 video camera lens instead.

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.

Are the various pod front panels different?

Yes. Another continuity error involves the exterior front panel beneath the EVA pod window. When HAL commands the pod to 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 and extra details over those on the full-sized pods seen elsewhere in the film. (details 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 he know that half a century later people with personal computers and 4K film scans would be poring over individual film frames!

There are also extremely minor differences between the pod bay pods' panels and the space pod panels (in addition to the HAL lens difference 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:

Are those exterior dishes supposed to be rockets?

No.

The five or six (depending on the pod) recessed aluminium dishes are narratively meant to contain video cameras. Close-up photos in the Kubrick Archives clearly show visible lenses within fluted and turned metal cylinders, and the blueprints call them “television eyes,” which is charmingly anachronistic. These cameras, incidentally, look basically the same as the ones in the Space Station V set during the voiceprint ID scene, and the one in the PicturePhone. Though those cameras were angled down.

The cone on the port aft side, at the top, is also supposed to be a camera, 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 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. 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.

So where are the rockets?

Narratively the pod's small directional rockets are meant to be the five black circular recesses around the protruding hemispherical domes on the two earmuffs. The figure-8 shapes 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. Then there's the large rocket on the underside of the pod.

How were the small engines meant to work?

The engines are not discussed in the film itself. However, Frederick Ordway described how he thought the vernier 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.

However, we can assume, based on Ordway's remarks, that they operated on some fictitious 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 was then used as a propellant via the thrusters, providing instantaneous control.

The EVA pod interior control panels, designed with engineers from Hawker Siddeley, had specific control buttons for controlling these motors, which were specifically referred to as “vernier” rockets. Vernier thrusters are simply small secondary rocket engines for fine vehicle movement, as opposed to the large primary thruster such as the one on the bottom of the ship.

Did the pod’s small engine arrangement make sense?

Narratively, not entirely.

Here it’s a bit complicated. When floating around in space you wouldn’t need a vastly huge set of engines simply to manoeuvre around, since you’re not fighting against the gravity of a 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 earmuff (protruding flat cone things on each side of the pod) has five obvious recessed rocket motors on it that could be used as RCS (reaction control system) thrusters. Interestingly these rockets had long engine bells sticking out in earlier pod designs, but these were removed for the final versions.

The earmuffs also had the figure 8 shaped thingies which look like they might 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 sides.

The only problem with the EVA pod RCS design is that 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 a plane this would mean raising the nose, or lowering the nose) They would have full control over their roll and yaw, and would also be able to support forward translation in an inefficient way. 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.

I mean, I guess there could be some kind of reaction wheel mechanism inside the pod that could be used for attitude control, the way space probes and satellites typically do. But if so, why have the RCS thrusters?

As noted earlier, the recesses with silver dishes and cylinders located around the pod were cameras, not engines angling out. And the two cylinders next to the entry step on the back door couldn’t have been engines either, since if they fired the whole pod would 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. (Moebius Models' decision to include a label with their model kit, reading "VERNIER THRUSTERS" for application next to these two cylinders is therefore incorrect. It also doesn't match the size of the lettering seen on the actual pods.)

What is the big engine meant to be for?

There is a large recessed rocket bell on the underside of the pod. People have long wondered about the narrative point of this one, since it would obviously just send the pod upwards (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.

This engine has a solid story rationale. The pods were meant to be used for, among other things, exploring the moons of Jupiter. And the engines would thus be used 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)

The rocket was intended by Frederick Ordway to be powered by liquid fuels. In the March 1970 issue of Spaceflight magazine he 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.

Of course we never see any of the engines firing in the movie, even when the pod is moving. Conjecture: It seems possible that 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.

Not sure how such a deep rocket bell, and its associated jet engine machinery, would fit in the small space directly under the pilot's ass, though.

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.

What’s on the underside of the pods?

We have no clear references to the underside of the pod. Most views of the pod don't show the underside at all, or when they do, do so at oblique angles. I know of no photos showing the undersides clearly, and the full-sized pod blueprints contain details on the underside that were never built.

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 shadow.

Only one shot in the movie shows more – 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 more detail: 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, this is an obvious continuity error.

Unfortunately this shadowed view is the only information we have on these mystery details. And the image, even in 65mm, 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 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.

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.

What shape were the pod window surfaces?

There are three basic possibilities for the topology of the oval-shaped window glass in the EVA pod. The windows could have been flat, they could have been curved in one direction (ie: a cylinder), or curved in two directions (ie: bulging like a flattened sphere or ovoid).

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, as though the glass had been wrapped around a large diameter cylinder. In reality they probably just bent the thin acrylic plastic sheet slightly.

Are the details on the pod real things?

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. These have mostly been identified as components from commercial plastic model kits, typically model railway kits. In Star Wars terminology these detail parts are known as “greeblies” though apparently the 2001 crew called them “wiggets”.

Specific 1960s model kits have been identified as the source for many of these parts. The kits include:

A number of these kits were identified by model maker Martin Bowers (Alien) and VFX supervisor Lee Stringer. Some parts only appear on the full-sized pods, and some only appear on the superdetailed closeup front panel that was built.

Was all the text real?

The EVA pods are covered with tons of detailed writing, 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 using Letraset's rub-down dry transfers.

However, the tiny blocks of long text are mostly boilerplate. Some are actually chunks of recycled legalese about Letraset international patents taken from the original dry transfer sheets. Others are 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.

How were the arms supposed to work?

That's a good question. There are some aspects of the two arms that are narratively pretty straightforward and obvious. Each arm can slide in or out on the rectangular metal beams, which can also rotate in their body sockets. Each arm has an “elbow” which permits 90° bends of the upper arms.

But then there are two sub-arms to each arm, and I'm not sure what the point of that is. It seems that the fact that the sub-arms are both linked at the base really limits what they'd be able to do. They do give the ability to open up and catch murdered astronauts, I guess.

Each sub-arm is 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 has 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 can rotated 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. 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.

What was the roller door for?

The EVA pods had a ridged curved thing below the step, at the back of the pod. It looks very much like a roller door for a garage or a rolltop 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”.

Indeed, one of the starboard control panels on the interior also has a group of pushbuttons labelled “PROBE JETTISON”. So basically it was narratively a mini garage for space probes, but the idea was dropped from 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.

What was the miniature door on the back for?

There's a small door panel or access hatch on the back of the pod, immediately to the starboard side of the main door. It has a T-shaped handle that was actually a piece from the Airfix SR-N1 hovercraft kit; a piece also found on the Jawa Sandcrawler model from Star Wars, incidentally! This door is labelled “ELECT MOD INSP ACC” and so was probably narratively seen as some sort of electrical component inspection door.

The one thing I don't get is why it was on the starboard side, when that's the side that the door itself rotates into. A door on the port side would have enabled a deeper void behind. But then maybe they saw it as a circuit breaker box or a fusebox from a car, which wouldn't need much space behind it.

Were the earmuffs symmetrical?

The “earmuffs” were the projecting flat-topped cones with rounded protrusions – located on the sides of the pod. Each earmuff – port and starboard – was exactly the same across all the full-sized pods. It looks like they made one fibreglass mould, and cast all of the earmuffs from it. However, the port earmuffs for each pod were simply rotated 180° from the starboard side. (the earmuffs were neither reflected 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 is identical.

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 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 even has parts of its starboard earmuff recess out of line! One of the model kit sprues got bumped, and a bunch of the parts are angled up 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, kept at the Kubrick Archives, that the two earmuff recesses contain parts mostly from the Renwal Polaris submarine and Airfix B-29 model kits. The large rectangular plate with the larger circular detail (the red bit) is from the Airfix model railway travelling crane.

What were the headlamps?

They weren't car headlights. 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 seem to have been tungsten filament sealed beams, PAR 64 or 8" in diameter, with clear/non-fresnel lenses. Something along the lines of GE 4559 bulbs.


Pod variants

How many pods were built?

The exact number is not known. We know that:

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

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

So what does this whole mess tell us?

How big were the full-sized pods?

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

Unfortunately the surviving in-progress full-sized pod blueprints published in 2001: the Lost Science by Adam Johnson 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".

The surviving blueprint of the miniature states that it's 13.5" 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". 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 pod interior have actually fit inside the pod exterior?

No.

A separate pod interior set, with all the individual backlit pushbuttons, was constructed by Hawker Siddeley Dynamics and filmed on a soundstage. However, this interior was not physically built inside any of the three full-sized pods built for the pod bay scene – though two of those had smaller mocked-up interiors. It's clear that the interior set could never have fit into the exterior pods in the bay.

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

This issue is particularly noticeable when it comes to the openings of the pod. The window looks fairly big from the outside (the actual glassed-in section), but quite small on the inside set. It's also set quite deeply in from the outside view, but in a more shallow way from the inside. And the door sizes similarly don’t match.

But, you may say, there are photos of the pod bay showing the astronauts climbing into a pod, and you can clearly see the interior! And that's correct. At least one of the pods in the pod bay was equipped with an interior. However, this was a scaled-down interior, quite rudimentary in its details, compared to the larger interior set used for the main piloting scenes. Close examination of the pod bay scene shows that the angles of the pod bay interior panels don't actually correspond to those in the main interior set. In addition, entire rows of illuminated buttons were eliminated from the pod bay interior set in order to cram the panels in there.

For the scene when the two astronauts squeeze into one of the pods and discuss disconnecting HAL you can see the pod bay exterior out the window. Conjecture: it seems probable that for this scene the interior set was forklifted into the middle of the pod bay set so that the view out the window would be correct.

A photo in the Kubrick Archives exists showing the pod interior set from the outside. Much of the detail is unfortunately obscured by a seated technician working on it, and the image quality is limited because it's a 35mm contact print, but you can clearly see where the various “wild” walls could be removed from the set, exposing the insides. The bulk of the interior – panels and lower sections – was 3/4" sheet plywood with 1x2 joiner blocks. The domed ceiling and vent bar appear to have been made from 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. Note that there is documentary film footage of 2001 in production that shows carpenters working on a plywood space pod interior, but that was the rudimentary in-pod interior, not the detailed larger interior.

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.

Where’s 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.

Could the EVA pods monitor the Discovery?

According to the panel buttons, 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.

Did they have actual flat panel displays?

Not as such. It was all done through on-set trickery.

Obviously there were no high-resolution electronic video screens with flat surfaces back in the 1960s. So the movie's flat panel displays were ingeniously simulated using film. All of the pod's interior displays were done via realtime in-camera effects rather than by superimposing screen footage onto the film later.

The sets had flat frosted screens 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 reels of “display” film could only hold so much footage, and had to be rewound between takes.

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) the prefilmed display shots were projected and the actors had to synchronize their moves to them. For the IBM Newspad scene they 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.

However, there are a couple of brief moments in Discovery footage and during the moonbus landing where you see optically superimposed display effects rather than in-camera effects.

The non-Kubrick sequel 2010, incidentally, used ugly bulbous glass CRT monitors for its displays, because they were much cheaper 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.

High-resolution photographs of the pod interior set, taken by Keith Hamshere, exist in the Kubrick Archives. From this it's possible to work out 85-90% of the pushbutton text. 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.

The only flashing light seen inside the EVA pod appears when Bowman arms the explosive bolts to blow open the door. And that only starts blinking when the dangerous explosive sequence is activated.

People often think there are Blinkenlights all over, but there weren’t. It's no lame-ass Batcomputer with rows of Christmas lights flashing randomly away. The lights were all pushbuttons which lit or went dark 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.

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. 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 vision.

What were the hand controllers?

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

The large gold-coloured cylinders with black rod-handles on them were the “waldo” controllers. These were narratively supposed to allow the astronaut to operate the external arms and claws.

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.

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

What is 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.

Incidentally the pod interior is equipped with what appear to be hydraulic valves and similar devices, all fastened to the inner sphere. I don't believe any of these have been identified, but they were probably all found objects.

Where did the explosive bolts pushbutton cover go?

During the escape sequence Bowman removes a machined metal 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. The thing was neither square nor rectangular. It's presumably the lid for a stowage container for things like the pushbutton cover, though you don't see it properly in the film – you just can catch a glimpse of the lid flipping down.


Action

Did the exploding hatch scene make sense?

Narratively, not really.

The main door was a rotating curved door that swivelled inwards and to starboard on a pair of tracks. It was larger than the opening in the side of the pod, was on the inside, and therefore was physically incapable of coming out of the pod.

This door also had a rectangular panel that seems to be meant to serve as the part blown out by the “explosive bolts”.  The hatch is visible as a slightly darker panel on the exterior of the door, and its perimeter is marked by red squares containing small turned aluminium cylinder heads that are presumed to be the bolts in question. We know that this panel was actually removable because there are behind the scenes photos in the Kubrick Archives showing actors Dullea and Lockwood hanging around behind one of the pod bay pods – with the door closed but the hatch removed.

So there are a couple of problems with the whole scene where Bowman enters the Discovery's airlock.

First, if we assume that the explosive bolts propel a secondary hatch in the door outwards, then we never see it in the scene. It would have flown outwards and crashed around the airlock quite dangerously. Instead the entire door, including the hatch, just vanishes.

Second, if we assume instead that the explosive bolts simply release the door, permitting it to open normally (in a rotational fashion) then we'd see the corner of the door in the upper right. This is because the door can't rotate all the way back into the pod - we see this in the parked pods in the pod bay. But we don't see the triangular corner of door in the exploding hatch scene – therefore the whole door is simply gone.

Third, it's true that if Bowman had been forcefully propelled out of the airlock by the air rushing out, then physics would dictate that the pod would be propelled away from the Discovery, owing to the sudden expulsion of the EVA pod's internal atmosphere into a vacuum. However, from what I've read it seems unlikely that there'd be such an explosive event from the decompression. Bowman wouldn't fly out like that, and presumably the pod would drift away, albeit more slowly. Alternatively Dave could have put the pod into some sort of autopilot “stationary” mode, and its internal guidance system could have kept it in place by firing its thrusters automatically.

Should Bowman have held his breath?

Bowman appears to bow his head and inhale deeply, holding his breath just before the explosive bolts blow the EVA pod door off. That's apparently a bad idea if being you're about to be plunged into a vacuum, since the gas in your lungs would expand and rupture them. You're better off hyperventilating for a bit to increase your blood oxygen level, then forcing as much air out of your lungs first.


Real Trivia

Is that an EVA pod in Star Wars?

This is something that comes up a lot and makes the clickbait rounds online. Yes, an object closely resembling a crashed 2001 EVA pod is indeed visible during the Watto’s junkyard scene in Star Wars Episode I: the Phantom Menace. No, it’s not an original one made for 2001.

The pod must have been a little Easter egg on the part of Lucas and his Leavesden production team. The Ep I pod is visibly very different from the actual 2001 pods. Plus you can see it in the background under construction during one of the film’s promotional webisodes.

There was also a spherical “speeder” vehicle parked outside the Mos Eisley cantina in the original Star Wars film, and that was believed to be an approximate homage to the 2001 pod design. Indeed, it’s described as an “Ubrickkian Landspeeder 9000 Z001" vehicle in the Ballantine Books blueprint set of 1977, presumably as a reference to “Kubrick 2001”. It’s a very loose homage, though – it’s kind of a mashup of the EVA pod and the Aries 1B lander, with additional windows added.

Weren’t the EVA pods were made by Grumman?

No.

Back in the late 1990s, when the “Tripod.com” free website service was hip and popular, a 2001 enthusiast created a web page on the topic of the EVA pod. He made up some fanfic technical specs, and combined it with some material that 2001 science consultant Frederick Ordway had written years earlier for the March 1970 issue of Spaceflight magazine. (Much of Ordway’s Spaceflight text was republished years later by Adam Johnson in his book 2001: the Lost Science) The fan material includes the claim that the pod was a “Grumman DC-5”.

The sole connection to production reality is that now-defunct US aerospace manufacturer Grumman, famous for being the primary contractor on the Apollo lunar modules, was indeed one of a number of companies that Kubrick's scientific advisors consulted with during film production. (Ordway visited the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Bethpage, New York State prior to 2001 production moving to Britain) However there is no evidence of any kind - that I’ve seen - showing that the production team saw the EVA pod as being a Grumman vehicle. Let alone a “DC-5”, which was of course a Douglas Aircraft passenger plane from the 1940s.

Weren’t the pods made by Hawker Siddeley?

The cockpit set was in real life, yes.

As noted, many firms advised Kubrick and company during the making of 2001. One of them was British aerospace firm Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, a division of the company that famously built the Harrier jump jet.

In fact, HSD’s Stevenage division (a mere half hour drive from EMI Elstree studios) was contracted to build the actual screen-seen interior set for the EVA pods, and Frederick Ordway was responsible for coordinating this work. A tiny HSD logo can even be seen on the port side of the pilot’s dashboard, but unlike the Bell Systems or IBM logos, is barely visible in the final film. A number of photos exist, incidentally, showing Hawker-Siddeley staff being taken around the 2001 sets by Frederick Ordway.

However none of this information is conveyed to the audience beyond the micrologo, and the pod is never identified as a Hawker Siddeley vehicle.

I don’t know if the earmuffs and pod exteriors were made at EMI Elstree or elsewhere. It is interesting to note that HSD’s plastics division, which made things like large radar domes, was also based in Stevenage. Conjecture: perhaps this group cast the fibreglass space pod spheres and earmuffs for the 2001 production team to build the full-sized pods.

Another interesting point is that there's noticeable wear to the leatherette anti-slip surfaces applied to the hand-shaped controllers on the EVA pod and Orion shuttle sets. Conjecture: Perhaps these were actual prototypes for user input devices constructed by Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, and loaned to 2001 for use in the film. It would seem surprising to see pale lines embedded in the leather-like texture of the grips for something freshly built for the movie sets. For more information on the hand controllers, check out my page on the subject.

Didn’t the pods have names?

Not on-screen. In the script and finished movie the pods are never named. The script refers to "pod number 2". The film has Bowman command HAL to rotate pod B (the middle pod) in one scene, but mysteriously "pod G" in another scene. Which doesn't make much sense - surely it should be pod C? But he definitely doesn't say C. He sort of mumbles so perhaps it was "Prep pod three", but it doesn't sound like it to me.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, which was written in conjunction with the screenplay, the pods are named Annie, Betty, and Clara.

What else do the blueprints say?

It's hard to make out all the text, but the full-sized pod blueprints have some very interesting things labelled as “construction notes.”

Text with question marks I can’t make out. The pods in these drawings do not entirely match the finished pods, so clearly various changes occurred subsequently. The sizes of the models also changed – the sizes here do not appear to be the final ones.

Other features may or may not have been built, but we don’t see them in the final film or in behind the scenes photos. There’s no probe locker scene (maybe that was for when Dave explores the monolith in space?), no solid fuel container (though there is a red box on the back of one full-sized pod that’s missing in the scene when the astronauts board, and it has the text “REACT CELL INSERT”), there are no tools or tool lockers shown, there’s no exterior light for a panel, and no jet effects are visible in the film.


COPYRIGHT

This text is copyright © 2024 and 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. 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.

CONTACT

If you have any corrections or comments, feel free to drop a line:

contact@3dsf.info