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CLAIRE CORBETT ON NASA AND 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

The most terrifying fact about the universe

is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent However vast the darkness, we must
supply our own light Stanley Kubrick
The retirement of the space shuttles marks
the end of NASAs human space flight program, at least for now Mike Orcutt, MIT
Technology Review

n 21 July 2011, forty-two years and one

day after the Apollo 11 Moon landing,
NASAs space shuttle program a program
that had spanned three decades concluded
with the final return trip of Atlantis from the

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International Space Station (ISS). It felt like

the end of an era and it was. My son had
just turned twelve, and it seemed the right
time to show him 2001: A Space Odyssey, a
film Ive loved since I was a child.
What does Kubricks masterpiece say to
us at the end of the first and possibly final
age of space exploration?
In the decades since the Apollo program,
NASA and other space agencies have continued to generate technical innovations
and important data. The GRACE satellites,
for example, provide critical information
on climate change by measuring shifts in
gravity. Even so, public interest has waned

A few weeks before Atlantis final flight, the

Economist published an article announcing
that it is likely the Space Age is over. The
article proposed that human space flight
was fantasy-made-reality, and to fantasy it
would return. While noting the usefulness
of our many satellites, the writer concluded
that, from now on, the geostationary orbit of
36 000 kilometres above Earths surface is
not space, but rather Earths new boundary,
a boundary it is possible we may never again
cross as astronauts.
The notion of crewed space flight as fantasy-made-reality struck me as a powerful idea.
I began to think of 2001: A Space Odyssey
and NASA as the twin stars of the imagined
(fantasy) and the real (reality), as fiction
and fact spinning each around the other in
a dance that began at the dawn of the space
age and that continues today in our imaginations. Both embodied the ideals of the heroic
age of space flight, but also incarnated the
soaring optimism of the 1960s: the belief
that humans were evolving, that prosperity
would last, that things would only get better.
2001 was released in April 1968, eight
months before the Apollo 8 mission on 21
December. Apollo 8 was the first crewed
space flight to leave Earths orbit and the
mission that gave us the iconic Earthrise

photograph (described by Galen Rowell

as the most influential environmental
photograph ever taken) that inspired the
nascent ecology movement and the idea of
Spaceship Earth.
Just over a year after 2001s release, the
world paused to watch the Apollo 11 Moon
landing on 20 July 1969, an event that
seemed to herald a chapter of unparalleled
human mastery, a time in which human consciousness would expand into the cosmos.
Its remarkable how short that heroic age
of manned space flight turned out to be. The
narrative of astronauts propelled from Earth
on massive Saturn V rockets expanded in
our imaginations, and it is shocking to realise it all happened over a span of just four
years, from December 1968 to December
1972, and involved only twenty-four astronauts, all of them Apollo crew members and
all of them American men. These are the
only people ever to have left Earths orbit.
Legendary German rocket engineer and
later founder of the Saturn V program,

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dramatically since the glamorous days of the

Moon landings.
Orcutts conclusion that NASAs human
space flights are over echoes many commentators reaction to the end of the shuttle
program: one of palpable dismay. The heroic
age of the astronaut and of Americas leadership in space seems to have come to an end
with an undignified bump. Now, American
astronauts depend on the Russians for transport to the ISS, and the first images from the
Moons surface in thirty-seven years have
come from Jade Rabbit, a Chinese rover that
landed there on 14 December 2013.

Its remarkable how short that

heroic age of manned space
flight turned out to be it all
happened over a span of just
four years, from December
1968 to December 1972, and
involved only twenty-four
astronauts, all of them Apollo
crew members and all of them
American men.

Wernher von Braun, famously quipped,

With the space program, your tax dollar
really will go further. Now it appears that
the tax dollar wont go far at all. In 2010,
US President Barack Obama cancelled
the Bush administrations Constellation

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Program, which proposed bases on the

Moon and crewed missions to Mars. George
W Bush may have wanted to emulate John F
Kennedy in promoting American leadership
in space, but the wars he began usurped
the role of the space program in shoring up
American pride, not to mention soaking up
huge amounts of money.
Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, mission
specialist on the final flight of space shuttle Endeavour, observed: The amount that
NASA has been able to spend on the space
program is very small the air conditioning in Afghanistan for troops was more than
all of NASA. In 2012, the US spent $647
billion on defence thirty-six times more
than the $17.7 billion allocated to NASA. In
1966, NASAs funding was 4.41 per cent of
the American federal budget; it is now less
than 0.45 per cent the lowest figure ever.
Indeed, Americans spend more on pet food
than on the space program.
Its perplexing there is so much wrangling
about the cost of space exploration, especially since governments spend such vast sums
unproductively. It is probably impossible
to calculate the benefits that space-related
research has generated. To take just one
example: in the 1960s, computers were the
size of rooms and no manufacturers imagined a market for more than a handful of
the enormous, expensive machines. NASA,
however, realised it needed small, light
onboard guidance computers. The Apollo
Guidance Computer, with its 2K of memory,
was the first computer to use silicon chips.
At the time this was considered a courageous decision, and ongoing demand from
the Apollo program meant the industry had
an incentive to keep producing them. The
effects of the decision to use silicon chips
and develop smaller computers are too obvious and far-reaching to discuss here.
2001, which imagined the first age of
human space flight, and NASA, the agency

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that made it happen, both promised a neverending story. But instead of the beginning
of a brave new world of expansion into the
infinite, 2001 and the Apollo program were
probably the zenith of humanitys incursion
into space.

THE HEROIC AGE: FANTASY

MADE REALITY
No-one embodies the dance of the imagination (fantasy) and the science (reality)
of space exploration more perfectly than
Wernher von Braun, the first director of
NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center.

Instead of the beginning of a

brave new world of expansion
into the infinite, 2001 and the
Apollo program were probably
the zenith of humanitys
incursion into space.
Heading the list of scientists targeted for
interrogation by US military intelligence
after the Second World War, von Braun was a
rocket genius who built V-2 ballistic missiles
with slave labour and rained them down on
London. He did more than any other person
to get the Apollo astronauts to the Moon: he
designed the enormous Saturn V rockets
that propelled them there. He was simply
the greatest rocket scientist in history,
according to one NASA source.
When von Braun collaborated with Walt
Disney on a number of space-travel episodes for the Disneyland TV series, he was
treated with unquestioning deference by
the entertainment icon. But the German
was portrayed very differently by AmericanJewish filmmaker Kubrick: in Kubricks
1964 black comedy Dr Strangelove, von
Braun is caricatured as the eponymous mad

Yeah, on a Friday night [on the ISS] the

Russians would come on over and Id introduce my Russian colleagues to a lot of our
science-fiction movies. The first one we
watched turned out to be 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and they had never seen it.
Gregory Chamitoff
Space flight is indeed fantasy-made-reality,
as the Economist said, but the influence runs
both ways. The impact of reality on 2001 is
profound: it is one of the most meticulously
researched films in history. Kubrick hired
advisers Fred Ordway and Harry Lange,
the latter having worked for von Braun at
NASA.
Ordway visited General Electrics Missile
and Space Vehicle Department to research
spaceship propulsion; Bell Telephone
Laboratories for deep-space communications; Whirlpool for food equipment in space;
and IBM for computer sequences. Moreover,
the command module displays used in 2001

were based on those at Honeywell nuclear

reactors. When George Mueller, the director of NASAs Office of Manned Space Flight
visited the British set of 2001, he dubbed the
complex NASA East. Indeed, the film was
so accurate that parts were later used by
NASA in training astronauts.
In August 2011 we were again reminded how well Ordway and Lange did their
homework: the worlds media reported with
bemusement that Samsung, embroiled in
a patent lawsuit with Apple, had cited 2001
as the design inspiration for its Galaxy Tab,
rather than Apples iPad2. A clip from 2001
of astronauts David Bowman and Frank
Poole using personal tablet computers was
submitted as evidence.

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scientist, still at heart a Nazi. This characterisation reminds us von Braun was not
just the patron saint of space travel but
also heavily involved in developing the US
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)
program. Rocket technology made possible
the build-up of the global Cold War arsenal
of ICBMs and underpinned the doctrine of
mutual assured destruction (MAD).
Its almost beyond irony that, after satirising von Braun, Kubrick virtually collaborated
with him in creating his next film, 2001. Like
Disney, Kubrick could not help himself and
fell in love with von Brauns grand vision.
Its no accident that one Disneyland episode
featured a rotating 250-foot-diameter space
station in orbit above the Earth that bears
a striking resemblance to the space station
in 2001 more than a decade later in both
cases, the idea was von Brauns.

SLOW, FAST, SLOW: FANTASY

BECOMES FAMILIARITY
2001 polarised critics when it was released,
and continues to do so: most viewers decide
it is either a masterpiece or intolerably
boring. Many characterise it as far too slow,
and its true we can only be grateful Kubrick
cut an eleven-minute sequence of Bowman
jogging inside the wheel of the spaceship
Discovery. Yet, within that hypnotic slowness
there is the most audacious cut in film history: the ape-tossed bone transforming into a
space-age weapon above the Earth, an orbiting nuclear weapons platform.
Ive thought a great deal about this. The
slowness is at the heart of the films greatness because it pushes the viewer into an
altered, hypnotic state. 2001 does not want to
show you, it wants to transport you. Kubrick,
the ultimate tyrant director, demands your
surrender.
But the change of pace from slow to fast
achieves something else: it switches the
tone of 2001 from the awestruck and sublime to the satirical and mundane, and then
back again. These shifts are profound, but

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they leave some viewers with metaphysical

whiplash.
This shift from the sublime to the absurd
occurs throughout the film, but is most
perfectly shown in Dr Heywood Floyds journey to the space station. To the sounds of
Strauss The Blue Danube, the space station
sweeps into view; we then see Floyd sleeping in his seat, his pen floating next to him
in zero gravity, the hostess retrieving his pen
and then her walking away in velcro-soled
shoes.
These scenes serve as a counterpoint
to the epic scale of the rotating space station and the eerie otherworldliness of the
Moon. While there is a cinematic purity and
aesthetic pleasure in these observations of
bodies in motion, there is something else
as well: a kind of bored familiarity. Future
shock has become future yawn.
Most viewers remember the visual
joke about the complex instructions for
the zero-gravity toilet. The toilet, the napping scientist, the banal discussion about
sandwiches on the way to the Moon crater

Even in the future, set

against the most advanced
technologies we can imagine,
we are still animals that must
sleep, eat and defecate.
Tycho all of these point to the inescapable
and comic fact that even in the future, set
against the most advanced technologies we
can imagine, we are still animals that must
sleep, eat and defecate.
But there is another startling aspect to our
natures that Kubrick understands. Here, at
the beginning of manned space flight, before
any astronaut has even left Earths orbit,
Kubricks artistic intuition shows us exactly
how space travel is going to be: the sublime

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quickly turning to the everyday. Not because

space is mundane, but because of the process through which humans adapt: the new
must always and rapidly become familiar,
the marvellous pedestrian. We do something
astonishing, and the next moment it is routine. Whats next, we want to know.
Floyd, en route to another day on the job,
is napping while travelling through space.
The other visual joke of 2001 shows scientists lining up in their spacesuits to have
their picture taken in front of the mysterious monolith. This strange artefact has just
shattered their understanding of the universe and the place of humankind within it,
but they turn their backs on it for a happy
snap like tourists at Niagara Falls. With this
sequence, Kubrick makes his point clear:
the numinous and the sublime confront us
whenever we choose to look, but we are limited and stereotyped in our reactions. It is a
preoccupying theme of his entire film career.

HALS CHILDREN: IM AFRAID I

CANT DO THAT, DAVE
The real star of 2001 and its most memorable character is HAL, the sentient
supercomputer. Today the most adventurous
space travel, both within the solar system
and beyond, is undertaken by machines
alone: Voyagers 1 and 2, the unmanned
Cassini and Juno spacecrafts and the Mars
rovers are all, so to speak, HALs children.
NASA now attempts to transport human
consciousness further into space without the
expense or danger of moving our physical
bodies. It does this by encouraging human
identification with its mechanical explorers,
giving them names and personalities and
even streaming tweets of their thoughts.
In a sense, NASA is in the film business:
the way we now explore space is through
screens. NASA has learned its lessons from
Disney and Kubrick, but has moved its

Q to Siri: Whats your favourite movie?

A: I dont really have a favourite. But I hear
2001: A Space Odyssey got some good
reviews.
iPhone screen shot posted to Twitter
The question of HALs psychology and, by
extension, the reason for his breakdown
is one of the three main mysteries in 2001,
the others being the origin and purpose of
the black monolith and the meaning of the
ending.
Humanitys incredible ability to adapt,
which almost immediately renders each
stunning advance familiar, eludes HAL,
who is focused on his own perfection, on
the reason for his existence. But HAL has
been made to keep a secret, the secret of the
monolith and its signal to Jupiter.
A secret is by its very nature highly meaningful; perhaps it throws a spanner into
HALs workings in the same way the monolith does to humanitys understanding of the
universe. As a computer, HAL cannot alter
his frames of reference, zooming in and out
in that effortless way of humans.
This inability of the machine to adapt is
powerfully explored by Kubrick again in A.I.
Artificial Intelligence, a film he storyboarded
to the last scene before it was directed by

Spielberg (following Kubricks death). In

A.I., an artificial boy is programmed to love
his human mother, and he does so until the
end of time, so steadfastly and intensely that
the film becomes an existential horror story
about the cruelty of visiting emotion, even
life itself, upon an unchanging being.
This is why HALs story is the most affecting part of 2001 and why Kubrick, a famously
chilly and intellectual director, can make us
weep for the murderous computer during
his measured but insistent protests against
Dave switching him off, his regression to
childhood and finally his death.
The 2008 Pixar animation WALL-E is a
robot-in-space fable for my sons generation.
The film (like most space films, including Moon and Gravity) pays tribute to 2001,
down to the details of red-eyed spaceship
computer Otto as antagonist and sequences
of robots dancing in space.
WALL-E takes HALs tragedy and replays
it as comedy. The trash collecting robot
protagonist, WALL-E, is faithful to his programmed objectives, tirelessly cleaning up
the mess humans have made of the Earth,
but as he does so he begins to find wonder
and meaning in the objects he collects,
a meaning that leads to love rather than
murder. He can find meaning because he
has learned in his long years of solitude to
appreciate art.
The gap between HAL and human is
thus bridged, and it is bridged with music
and dance. In the case of WALL-E, with the
songs from Hello, Dolly!
As 2001 is the template for WALL-E, so
Disneys Pinocchio is the template for A.I.
David, the artificial boy, yearns to be real
and win his mothers love. Pinocchio is also
referenced in WALL-E: the robot has his
Jiminy Cricket in the form of a cockroach,
and becomes real when Eve kisses him. The
Pinocchio reference is important because
HAL, David and WALL-E are all children;

CLAIRE CORBETT

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message from TV and film to desktop and

social media.
The most remarkable tweet stream is
from Voyager 2, offering existential stoicism bordering on despair as it journeys ever
farther out into the cold and dark (it is now
over 15 billion kilometres away, at the very
edge of our solar system). When I replied to
one of its tweets saying that its never-ending
mission made me melancholy, Voyager 2
answered: Indeed I try not to think about
it too much. I will likely outlast humans, the
Earth, and even the Sun.

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they are our offspring, our creations, enacting helplessly and forever whatever we have
programmed them to. We are reminded
of this when HAL sings Daisy, Daisy as
he dies; he is not responsible for his predicament. HAL and all the other robots and
computers in art rebellious, murderous,
suffering or endearing stand in for us and
our relation to the universe. What is our
mission? What is the secret buried in our
programming?
If we are programmed, if we have not created our own natures, then we too are not
responsible. Our mechanical children are
one symbol of our protest against reality,
against the fact our programming doesnt fit
what the world demands of us. That is why
we weep for HAL.

THE STAR CHILD LOOKS AT

EARTH: THE AGE OF THE
ANTHROPOCENE
2001 focuses on the theme of our animal
natures, our instincts to the end. Even after
Bowman enters the star gate and travels
beyond infinity, the final scenes in the elegant rooms reveal the effects of time upon
his body and show him eating a meal, up
until the final moment on the bed when he
transforms into the star child.
The star child implies that evolution
demands we leave our tools behind, or rather
incorporate them so completely into ourselves that we are one. As Arthur C Clarke,
co-scriptwriter for 2001, famously said, any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The star child is a magical creature: he
is his own spaceship, inhabiting space as
a biological creature born to it, as big as a
planet, but a supreme being because he is
conscious. As befits a religious image for
the scientific age, the star child in Clarkes
source story for 2001 is not omniscient:

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Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts

and brooding over his still untested powers.
For though he was master of the world, he
was not quite sure what to do next. But he
would think of something.
As we near the end of the age powered
by ancient sunlight and the close of the
first and perhaps only space age looms
we are at a critical time in the epoch that
began with the Industrial Revolution: the
Anthropocene, the name scientists use for
the modern era in which all aspects of life
on Earth are altered by human activity.
When 2001 was released, fear around the
power to destroy the Earth centred on nuclear war. WALL-E updated the fears suffusing
Dr Strangelove and 2001; the starkest threat is
shown to be unbridled consumption. Weve
polluted not only Earth but even the space
around it recently NASA was criticised
for not doing more to remove the cloud of
debris orbiting Earth and posing a serious
threat to spacecraft (as shown in Gravity).
When considered in 2014, the final image
in 2001 that of the star child, as big as the
blue bauble floating before it foreshadows
the looming danger of the Anthropocene: we
are outgrowing our planet.
Like the star child, we are master of the
world but unsure what to do next. But we do
need to think of something, as we are using
up resources at a terrifying rate. Already
humans consume around 40 per cent of the
primary photosynthetic production of the
Earth.
The star child has evolved beyond planetary limits, as we seem to have, and yet those
limits now confine us to the planets surface.
The irony is that by becoming too big for our
planet, consuming resources at a rate we
cannot replace, we render ourselves Earthbound, unable to leave our exhausted planet.
If our technological society fails altogether, we will still have our robot children
travelling through space forever (like

CODA: ITS ORIGIN AND

PURPOSE STILL A TOTAL
MYSTERY
These are the last words, spoken about the
monolith, in 2001. For many puzzled viewers, these words also describe the film and
its vision of life. Critic John Simon, for
instance, criticised 2001 as a shaggy God

The final image in 2001 that

of the star child, as big as the
blue bauble floating before
it foreshadows the looming
danger of the Anthropocene:
we are outgrowing our planet.
story. While Kubrick presents the monolith
as an alien artefact that quickens evolution,
no-one could believe this Mosaic tablet from
the heavens is just a machine.
Seeing the old man confronted by the
monolith at the end of his bed in 2001s final
sequence, I was surprised by feeling almost
unbearably moved by this collision of the
domestic with the infinite. Perhaps I was in
tears with the middle-aged realisation that
here was an image of the black gate through
which we all must pass into the unknown.
My son wanted to know what the ending
meant and particularly whether HAL was
alive and had feelings. How could we ever
know whether artificial intelligence is conscious or not? I said that unless you believed
that there was a ghost in the machine, a

spiritual presence animating life, it was hard

to think of a reason why artificial intelligence
could not become conscious.
Its true that a computer can only ever be an
array of materials made from atoms forged
eons ago in the hearts of stars and then
deposited by solar winds, comets or asteroids onto the Earth. But then, so are we.
Niels Bohr said that a physicist is just an
atoms way of looking at itself; this is literally
true, and if you think about it long enough,
the statement bends your mind. Discussing
the issues of matter, spirit and consciousness raised by 2001 with my son led us
to the exhilarating feeling that whichever
origin story you choose God or Big Bang
neither explains how we came to be who
created God? nor how the atoms created in
the nuclear furnace of stars could organise,
replicate and become conscious. Far from
draining the cosmos of mystery and meaning, it seemed to us the scientific story was
more wondrous and haunting.
We feel nostalgic for the passing of
crewed space exploration because NASA
embodies the deeply philosophical project
of understanding the cosmos and our place
within it. That is the project Kubrick fell in
love with. He showed us that individually we
are small and limited but that as a species we
can do something grand.
It is astonishing that atoms have built
themselves into machines, both human
and computer, in order to understand their
own workings. The origins and purpose of
the universe and our life, however, are still a
total mystery, a darkness in which we must
supply our own light.
Thanks, Stanley, for giving us some of
yours.

CLAIRE CORBETT

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Voyager 2) or stuck fast on other planets

(like the Mars rovers), eternal monuments
to what we once achieved. I will likely outlast
humans, the Earth, and even the Sun. Maybe
another species will find them and wonder
about their creation, as we would if we found
alien artefacts such as the monoliths in 2001.

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