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One of the people Kubrick hired for 2001 as a scientific consultant
was Frederick Ordway III. You see his name in the credits.
Ordway had joined the American Rocket Society as a teenager during the
war and worked for pioneer rocket engine maker Reaction Motors, Inc.
(I was given a wonderful book last year, America's First Rocket
Company: Reaction Motors, Inc by Frank winter - recommended) and went on
to join the NASA Manned Space flight Center in Huntsville.
An avid science fiction reader, he was a friend of Arthur C Clarke, and he
moved with his family to England for the production of 2001.
He went to painstaking amount of effort to consult with a large range
of companies, including IBM, Boeing, General Dynamics, Grumman,
Westinghouse, Bell Telephone, Honeywell on what their vision of the
future might look like. The manufacturers were apparently all to happy
to provide enormous amounts of material and concepts, partly in the
hope of getting free placements. So for example we see the Westinghouse
branded hot food dispensers and the IBM avionics and tablet computers,
none of which existed but Kubrick's production crew would mock up from
concept art.
NASA was also consulted and of course astronauts loved Velcro, so we see
things like the Grip Shoes.
Deke Slayton and George Mueller, who headed the NASA Office of Manned
Space Flight, visited the production set and upon seeing how much material
Kubrick and Ordway had amassed christened the place "NASA East".
Anyway, a lot of the authentic look of the film owes much to Fred Ordway
being instructed to make all the spacecraft and technology look plausible.
Unfortunately Ordway passed away a few years ago but he wrote
several books including on working on 2001 and gave presentations
to film and science buffs.
One of the fabulous photos Ordway would show is the one I attached
below during the filming of 2001. Imagine the conversation you could
have with this bunch of guys!
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