"My god, its full of stars.."

Forty years on and Kubricks 2001 still manages to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In some ways, its an impenetrable melange of images and concepts, confusing and open to interpretation, but in others its just sheer eye candy and a delight and amazement to watch. The ships and vehicles in the film are awesome and the effects were never bettered until decades later.

One of the most recognisable designs is the Pan Am Orion Space Clipper, one of the (sadly) few models to emerge from the film. Airfix and Aurora produced kits of the ship and although the latter did have a removeable rear section and included the nuclear reactors, neither were little more than pretty plane kits.

Recently, Stargazer models have released an interesting resin based kit of the Orion 2 Cargoplane - the workhorse version of the passenger ferry, complete with opening bay doors and the satellite seen floating above the earth at the opening 'future' scenes from the film. It also includes a one man space pod too. Not a kit for the amateur, as resin models can be a bit of a challenge, it nevertheless presents a fascinatingly different aspect to this iconic spaceship. Also, see the authors sketch of the Orion 1 first stage near the bottom of the page...