After having rented 2001: A Space Odyssey several times, I decided to buy the DVD. This is a great near future technology imagination, but sometimes I get a little disappointed by the things that were imagined by Kubrick and Clarke that have not yet come to pass, such as routine human spaceflight and substantial structures on orbit.
One interesting difference between the imagined and what has been learned in the meantime to be the best way to do things is the absence in 2001 of "fluffy" spaceships and space stations. Here is a screenshot of the space shuttle in the movie that would need either to be fluffier or to have more advanced materials capable of taking the heat of reentry to the Earth's atmosphere. It's not easy to see in this screenshot, but there is a Pan American logo. I think that's funny.
And here's a space station to which the space station travels. NASA and Bigelow Aerospace have figured out that the best way to build space station modules is to make them inflatable. All of the spaceships and space stations in 2001 have hard shells.
If we remade the movie nowadays, what would it look like?
I would build that space station using an in-space nylon vacuum casting technique whereby the tubular structure appears to be extruded ;)
That way you'd just launch the monomers on the lowest bidding carrier, kick start some real launch competition in the process, and the station would be nicely radation shielded for the inhabitants at L1.
Posted by: Kevin Parkin | April 14, 2005 at 10:47 PM