Mystery in Queens

[beamjockey]

Can you help solve a puzzle?


What is this spaceship?

I'm pretty sure this is the same model, in a different museum, before it settled at AMMI.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

If you recall, in "2010" there is a scene in which a couple of astronauts transfer by spacewalk from the Leonov to the Discovery, which is tumbling end over end (its carousel having long since seized up), and they land on the center section of the spine, which, as mentioned above, is yellow with sulfur ejected from Io's volcanoes. I think there had to have been a close-up model of this sort made for that scene.

(Incidentally, don't you think Clarke and Hyams seriously downplayed the nastiness of Jupiter's radiation environment in the vicinity of Io? I wouldn't go spacewalking around there, that's for sure.)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

(Incidentally, don't you think Clarke and Hyams seriously downplayed the nastiness of Jupiter's radiation environment in the vicinity of Io? I wouldn't go spacewalking around there, that's for sure.)

Yeah, big time.

Clarke is too smart for this, so perhaps he did some handwave in the novel that I've forgotten. Time for another trip to the cellar!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, I seem to recall that the Discovery had settled down at the L1 point between Io and Jupiter, which I don't think actually makes any sense at all, since that's not stable. The L4 or L5 points would make more sense, but then Discovery would be nowhere near Io itself, depriving us of the nice Io scenery.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Isn't criticism of science in a Peter Hyams movie almost as easy as with anything that ever squirmed out of Irwin Allen's brain?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, I was more criticizing Clarke's novel, which I seem to recall was almost as cavalier--and it bothers me, because as beamjockey said, he ought to have known better. It's a pretty solid novel for the most part, one of his last really good ones and maybe the best book in the 2001 series.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Ah... My apologies for the misunderstanding.