The rim of the carousel would move slowly enough to allow the actors to walk around with it as if they were in a hamster wheel. The entire set could rotate around its axis at up to 3 miles per hour (4.8 km/h). The set was a vertically-mounted 30-short-ton (27 t) circular set 38 feet (12 m) in diameter and 10 feet (3.0 m) wide. Kubrick spent $750,000, a large portion of his $6 million budget, on the set for the artificial gravity scenes in the carousel. Kubrick quickly decided against it, both because showing the ship accelerate by a 'putt-putt' method might be 'too comic' for film, and because it might be seen as him having embraced nuclear weapons after his previous film, Dr. Įarly in the development of the movie, Clarke and Kubrick considered having Discovery powered by an Orion type nuclear pulse propulsion system. In the film, Kubrick removed the fins because he thought that the audience might interpret them as wings giving the spacecraft the ability to fly through an atmosphere. In the book, Clarke says the fins 'looked like the wings of some vast dragonfly' and that they gave the ship a 'fleeting resemblance to an old-time sailing-ship'. He gave the ship a hypothetical thermonuclear propulsion system and added huge cooling fins to radiate away the excess heat produced. Clarke based the design on ideas that were, or he believed were, scientifically feasible. Despite this, the novelized and filmed appearances of the craft differ. The book and the film were developed in parallel in a collaboration between Clarke and Kubrick.

Clarke and the film of the same name produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The spaceship first appears in the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey by science fiction author Arthur C. He also built a large, expensive, rotating carousel for the artificial gravity scenes.ĭevelopment Early pre-production illustration of Discovery Kubrick changed this to the simpler route from Earth to Jupiter.įor the film, Kubrick built an exceptionally large model of the ship so that focus changes did not give away the true small size to the audience. The itinerary of Discovery One in the book is from Earth orbit via gravitational slingshot around Jupiter to Saturn and parking orbit around the moon Iapetus.

Kubrick dropped the cooling fins of the ship, fearing they would be interpreted as wings. The ship is destroyed in the second novel and makes no further appearances.Ĭlarke and Kubrick developed the first novel and film in parallel, but there were some differences to suit the different media. The ship is a nuclear-powered interplanetary spaceship, crewed by two men and controlled by the AI on-board computer HAL 9000. Clarke and in the films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) directed by Peter Hyams. The United States Spacecraft Discovery One is a fictional spaceship featured in the first two novels of the Space Odyssey series by Arthur C.

Hal 9000 computer power