History
This spaceship is founded on solidly conceived, yet unrealized science. One major concession was made in her appearance for the purpose of reducing confusion, and this was to eliminate the huge cooling "wings" which would be needed to radiate the heat produced by her hypothetical thermonuclear propulsion system. The producer and director Stanley Kubrick thought that the audiences might interpret the wings as meaning that the spacecraft was intended to fly through an atmosphere.
The Discovery One was named after Captain Robert Scott's sailing ship RRS Discovery, which was launched in 1901. Writer Arthur C. Clarke used to visit this ship when she was moored in London. She shares her name with a real spacecraft, the Space Shuttle Discovery (OV-103).
Read more about this topic: Discovery One
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)