Nice article, and I will grant that
2001 and
2010 stand well above most space sci-fi. However, as I have argued on this forum previously, the movies are not completely flawless. I'll work backwards.
The VFX crew for
2010 did their best to emulate the high contrast footage seen in real space mission film, but even in this they erred. Once in orbit around Jupiter, completely black shadows would be rare. Overall, the production did well with the freefall sections of the ships. The author of the article claims many goofs, but there were very few. In one scene, shortly after waking up, Floyd is in conference with the Russian crew, and he sips from a squeeze bulb, which he then drops on the table. The squeeze bulb in the accelerated habitat is not "wrong." However there is a later scene when
Leonov is docked on the back of
Discovery. Because of the proximity of the ships,
Leonov's rotating habitat has been halted. Yet inside, we see Floyd and Curnow slouched on a counter relaxing in what is obviously a "gravitated" habitat. Outside of that, I won't grouse too much about the actors not delivering fully convincing freefall performances. The director could lean on them only so hard without stilting the rest of their performances.
2001 has more obvious flaws, and it was not due to a lack of actual experience in space. The moonbus is seen gliding over the Moon in level flight. While this allowed Trumbull and company the opportunity to showcase their forced perspective sets, a real moonbus—making any trip longer than convenient by a ground crawler—would make point-to-point sub-orbital hops. It is safest, easiest and cheapest. Level "flight," as seen in the movie, would require constant and wasteful rocket thrust.
Both
2001 and
2010 showed the hibernating astronauts in the accelerated habitats. In reality, they would most likely be stowed in a freefall portion of the ship to minimize compression and deterioration of the tissues. (Long bed-ridden patients get bed sores.)
Out in deep space, we see
Discovery's comm antennas rotating slowly like a radar. The rig
would turn to compensate for the movement of the spacecraft and Earth, but it would not be perceptible. (On the matter of movements too slow to be perceived,
2010 showed the clouds of Jupiter in motion. However, the VFX artists
knowingly did this anyway for dramatic effect. It made Jupiter "feel" bigger on screen.)
A rotating habitat as small as the one in
Discovery might be practical, however it might also induce severe vertigo on the users due to Coriolis effects:
http://www.dvandom.com/coriolis/spacestation.html
http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw18.html
(
Leonov had a larger boom with habitats on either side and storage modules in between.)
One way in which
2010 went backwards is showing an abundance of paper on
Leonov, while
2001 showed the astronauts using "iPads." This may have been deliberate, as with the Jupiter clouds mentioned above, since fluttering papers were used at least twice to show movement of the ship.
While on the topic of paper and pens in space, I'd like to comment on a myth that many like to perpetuate about the early space program: NASA spent millions of tax dollars developing a pen that would work in freefall, while the Russians smartly used pencils. This is FALSE.
Paul Fisher developed the "space pen" for his own business, and NASA later adopted the pen for use on the Apollo flights—paying the small change any consumer would pay for one of the pens. The Russians later bought Fisher SpacePens, too, because they did not "burn up" in the oxygen atmosphere the way wooden pencils did. Also, the graphite in a pencil can be dangerous in freefall, floating about getting breathed in, or caught in an eye. Graphite can also cause electrical shorts if it gets behind a panel.
(In the movie
Apollo 13 we seen Tom Hanks, playing Jim Lovell, working a math problem, then
erasing a mistake. Fisher SpacePens were employed from Apollo 7 onward. Oops. Not the only error in the movie, though.)
I have not seen the movie
Moon, and so cannot comment on it.
