2001 Series - Discovery 1 - Pre-Production Alternate Model

Last crawled date: 10 months, 2 weeks ago

For the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a variety of concept studies were developed for the various special effects models used in the film. Among these studies were a group of concept drawings for the Discovery 1 spacecraft, most of which were rejected in favor of the ship that would eventually be seen in the film. However, there was one concept study that was actually constructed before it was abandoned in favor of the movie version. This model depicts that alternate version of the Discovery 1 spacecraft. It is based on sketches in Chris Frayling’s excellent book “The 2001 Files” and is fairly close to the filming version, but had added tension cable supports along the ships backbone and large movable cooling vanes. While credible design for the Discovery 1 spacecraft was considered very important to the movie, this design was rejected by Stanley Kubrick because the cooling vans looked too much like wings and would suggest that the spacecraft was meant to navigate through Jupiter’s atmosphere. The wings were removed, as were the tension cable system, leaving the final film version of the ship. #Kubrick, #2001, #Discovery, #HAL9000s, #space, #sci_fi, #moon, #Jupiter, #monolith, #Bowman, #Poole