2001: A Space Odyssey Question

[FalTorPan]

Last night I finished watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the fifth time or so. I love the movie, but one thing boggles my mind -- Frank Poole's spacewalks. Why the heck did he keep the pod so far away from the Discovery, and why did he not use a tether so that he wouldn't get... er... lost in space?

HAL reading Dave and Frank's lips seemed fairly obvious to me, too. The funny thing is that the pod had to rotate so that they could enter it. At that point there was no line of sight from the astronuts to HAL. The astronauts then had the pod rotate again so that HAL could stare right into the cab and see their lips.

UPDATE: Darn it. I meant to post this in the General Science Fiction forum!

 

[JustAFriend]

Frank had a maneuvering unit built into his suit. The idea was to park the pod back far enough that it can light the area but not bash into the critical equipment (I think this was mentioned in the book...)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Last night I finished watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the fifth time or so. I love the movie, but one thing boggles my mind -- Frank Poole's spacewalks. Why the heck did he keep the pod so far away from the Discovery, and why did he not use a tether so that he wouldn't get... er... lost in space?

In the novel version it was explained that the AE-35 antenna was so delicate that Frank was worried about the exhaust plumes from the pod's thrusters damaging it. In almost any other EVA situation, he never would have left the pod at all.

As for the lack of a tether, that was just a limitation of the film not being able to render realistic behavior of a tether in zero gravity. In the novel, Frank WAS attached to the pod by a safety line; after Hal ran him over with the pod, the thing dragged him halfway to Saturn before it ran out of fuel.

 

[Forbin]

Just to nitpick - the AE-35 unit was the designation of only the one little black box that failed - the one they brought aboard to repair - not the entire antenna unit. The writers of 2010 got that wrong as well.