Hi Bart,
Thanks for the great link.
Many members of this forum will be old enough to remember seeing
the Stanley Kubrick classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" when it first screened
forty-three years ago in 1968.
It is interesting to compare the interiors of the Shuttle cockpit, circa 2011,
with the interior of the Orion Pan-Am Clipper shuttle, which was created for the
movie during its production circa 1966-1968.
See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blile59/4911288507/
See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blile59...n/photostream/
Essentially the movie was, at the time, depicting how things
might look in
the future and it is remarkable how the combined visions of Kubrick,
his special effects team, set designers, Arthur C. Clarke and the direction
they sort from aerospace and computer industry consultants enabled them to provide
a design that is remarkably similar, if not even more elegant, than what
actually exists today in the early parts of the 21st century.
Keep in mind that, at the time the movie is made, we have not yet been to the
Moon and computers are mainly large mainframes that occupy entire rooms,
with information fed into them by teletypes or punch cards.
Evans & Sutherland,
the pioneers of computer graphics, does not even begin operations until
the same year the movie is already on the screen. So computer graphics,
let alone on colored monitors, is nearly non-existent and Kubrick employed
animators to create by hand what is designed to appear to be computer graphics
on the glass cockpit displays.
So when we compare the Orion Clipper in the movie to the Space Shuttle
today, it is interesting to reflect on how art can imitate life and how life can
imitate art.
I must admit though, like many readers who first saw that movie on the big screen
all those years ago, a little disappointed that we are still unable to take that
trip to the orbiting Hilton Hotel and from there onto the Moon.
When the Shuttle Atlantis launched last week, something like a million
people turned out to watch it at Cape Canaveral and probably millions more
around the world would have watched it either live or on the evening news.
It is still exciting and dramatic stuff.
Yet in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, what does
Dr. Heywood Floyd,
the fictional lone passenger aboard the Pan Am Orion Clipper do? Does he
stay glued to the window looking out and shouting "Wowee!"? Does he
grab his camera and shoot away at the beautiful vision of Earth below?
No, he does what most passengers do on a long intercontinental 747 flight today -
he sleeps.
So what Kubrick was saying was that in the future, space travel
would become so routine that it would, well, be almost boring. So it seems we still
have a long way to go.
Thanks again for that great link.
2011: A Space Odyssey
)
Not hard, I get car sick on the first 5 mins of a journey unless I look straight ahead. 
