A frame from the film showing our first glimpse of Orion in “2001.” Orion could carry up to 30 passengers, but space agency official Heywood Floyd travels alone on a chartered Pan American flight, due to the urgency of his trip to the moon to view a newly discovered alien artifact that predates mankind.
With no computer-generated imagery available in the 1960s, the exterior of Orion seen in the film is always a physical model about 44 inches (111 centimeters) long. The model had no lights or interior. The scene visible in the windows of the passenger cabin was composited in optically. In most of the handful of shots in which Orion appears, the space plane is a still photo rephotographed on an animation stand. Only when the Orion is shown matching its rotation to the space station is the model filmed in motion.
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