3D Printed studio scale model of Discovery from 2001 Space Odyssey

3D printing has come a long way and this can be seen in a hyper-detailed one-tenth studio scale model of the Discovery spaceship from the 2001 movie.

The prototype 3D printed model is more like movie prop replica. It photo etched and has resin parts added. It is high-end $13,000 model.

It will be available as a plastic kit next year and the price will come down to about $400. They will have a finished plastic next year for about $1500.

Video of an actual Discovery Movie Prop

Clip from 2001 the Movie

Making of 2001 – the Jupiter Mission

6 thoughts on “3D Printed studio scale model of Discovery from 2001 Space Odyssey”

  1. The greatest Sci-fi movie of that decade. People can dis it all they want, but there was nothing better back then and IMO it is still better than a lot of the garbage that has come out since.

  2. The wormhole from INTERSTELLAR was the best depiction of a wormhole yet. Not as trippy though.

    To me, the concept of the cubic wormhole is the most stunning.

    Visser envisages a cubic design, with flat-space wormhole connections on the square sides and cosmic strings as the edges. Each cube-face may connect to the face of another wormhole-mouth cube, or the six cube faces may connect to six different cube faces in six separated locations.

    Visser, M. “Wormholes, baby universes, and causality”, Phys. Rev. D, 41, No. 4, 1116–1124 (1990).

  3. The movie suffered from Shakespeare syndrome for me.
    By the time I saw it, I’d already seen all the good scenes, plots and themes done dozens of times by later movies, TV shows and music videos, so there was nothing left to enjoy.

    What was new was not good, and what was good was not new (because it had been copied by later people).

  4. The end was OK for me (having read the book).

    Psychedelic or just plain old school pouring-oil-over-a-glass pane fx.

    I take that they really tried to convey the weird feeling of traveling to the other side of the universe, probably through what we would call a wormhole nowadays, but lacked the means and Kubrick simply chose to mystify the scene a bit. Had they had the digital means Robert Zemeckis had for doing “Contact”, the travel of David Bowman would have look much closer to Ellie Arroway’s trip.

    The white room scene makes more sense if you know that Bowman was being held in a zoo and brought to rapid senescence, so he dies and then they “upload” him into the alien’s information matrix.

  5. I’m surprised it took so long for someone to do such a replica. Probably the new generations don’t know it. But soon there will be 50 year celebration projections on IMAX AFAIK.

    It’s a testament to how good a movie this was, that it is still watchable and enjoyable after 50 years.

    Lots of other movies have aged really badly, specially concerning their supposedly science fictional concepts.

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