Some time after an intellect-boosting encounter with an alien black monolith, he grasps the related concepts of tool-use and hunting. The book focuses on a hominid named Moonwatcher. They grub in the dust for bits of vegetation beside competing quadruped herbivores and huddle together at night listening to screeching big cats, for whom they make easy prey. The film and book 2001 both begin with a band of man-apes who are having a tough time of it. It offers a design and operational scenario for a nuclear-fusion-propulsion spacecraft named Discovery II which could reach Jupiter orbit in just four months and Saturn orbit in seven. The second paper is much more ambitious, but also more speculative. For comparison, Apollo spacecraft needed more than three days to travel from Cape Kennedy to lunar orbit. In the first paper, first published in 1997 and subsequently lightly revised, Stanley Borowski and Leonard Dudzinski looked at how a 24-hour voyage to a lunar surface base might be accomplished using Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) propulsion and liquid oxygen (LOX) mined from the Moon. This background explains why a pair of technical papers caught my attention as the year 2001 approached and passed. Nuclear propulsion engineers at NASA's Lewis Research Center (now Glenn Research Center) in Cleveland, Ohio, authored both papers. They described ways that the piloted spaceflight capabilities portrayed in the film and book 2001 might be made reality using technology and techniques that are either already in existence or are plausibly foreseeable. Image credit: The Stanley Kubrick Archives. Clarke (left) and Stanley Kubrick on the Aries-1B Moon shuttle passenger cabin set. None of this ambiguity troubled me in fact, the mysteries stoked my young imagination.Īrthur C. For example, in the movie 2001, Jupiter is the spaceship Discovery's destination in the book 2001, the natural wonders of the Saturn system as understood in 1968 are used to good effect. Clarke's novel fills in gaps, but its narrative differs from the cinematic narrative. The film 2001 is enigmatic, with mostly banal dialog and an ending that left many who saw it in its first run feeling confused and even cheated. (I expect that the existence of this blog makes the 'spaceflight fan' part kind of obvious.) I knew that I liked science - especially geology - so a 'science fiction' film sounded intriguing.īy the time the movie drew to a close, I had become a spaceflight fan and a science fiction buff.

By that point in my young life, I had been reading for three years. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick hit movie screens around the world.

I was six years old in April 1968, when the classic collaboration between science fiction author Arthur C.

I know, that sounds overwrought, but it's true. The film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey changed my life. An advanced LANTR Moon shuttle departs low-Earth orbit.

Space odyssey novel