Leave it to Clarke, Kubrick and Co. to come up with the perfect
embodiment of the public's vision of how a space station should look.
Hello, Station V from 2001: a Space Odyssey.
200 miles up, 900 feet in diameter, rotating at one RPM to generate
1/6 g. This was the sort of massive station with hundreds of occupants
that the public had been led to expect by decades of science fiction
and popular science articles. It even has a hanger in the hub
that could hold a shuttle that dwarfed anything on the drawing boards of
the real 21st century.
Another point about Station V is that it was
built half by the United States and half by the Soviet Union. It
says a lot about the Space Age that when the film came out Russia was
still seen as being a major space power that would keep pace with the
Americans into the next century. Today, not only are the
Russians still flying spacecraft that are of an incredibly vintage
design on a non-existent budget, we now know that even in its glory
days of the Moon Race, the Soviet Union was running a programme that
was so far behind the Americans that its a wonder that more men
weren't killed.
Kubrick's
notion was that by 2001 space travel would be so routine that a visit
to a space station would be like a visit to an airport with vending
machines, phone booths, Hilton Hotels, and Howard Johnsons. In
order to make this affordable, the designers of Station V bought mass
quantities of the most uncomfortable seats and settees ever devised by
man.
