I have a sort of weird fetish – I guess that’s kind of an understatement, really, as I feel like I’ve been pretty open about my many (usually automotive, I hope) fetishes with you on here – that involves eating meals in sci-fi movies. There’s something about meal scenes on spacecraft that always gets my attention, even before the Big Stuff happens. The dinner scene in Alien, for example, I love, at least until that slimy muppet bursts out of the guy’s chest, effectively ruining the meal.
Anyway, this train of thought brought me, like trains often do, to a bus. Not just any bus, though: a space bus, specifically the Moon Rocket Bus that was seen in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic sci-fi movie about black, featureless slabs that tell us to do things, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In case, somehow, you have forgotten about this particular mode of transportation and the food eaten within it from this 1968 movie, here’s the scene where the Moon Rocket Bus is the vehicular focus:
It’s very much a bus, really. It’s shaped like a bus, a long box, essentially, and has a cockpit for two up front, then a long open area at the rear for passengers and cargo. If it had wheels instead of what appear to be chemical rocket motors, this would absolutely be a bus. Maybe close to something like a tour bus.
The bus seems to have landing gear that looks to be retractable, and seems to fly at fairly low altitudes over the lunar surface.
The rear seems to have some sort of docking hatch, flanked by four rocket engines arranged diagonally, two on each side.
This diagram, by Lawrence Miller, also notes six unusually large-looking “steering rockets,” but based on their size and location, I suspect these are also used for launch and landing as well. There’s five passenger windows on either side, and some trapezoidal vertical wing-like protuberances that this diagram says are “heat sinks for life support,” so I guess those are radiators to reject excess heat?
The front end is sort of streamlined-looking, needlessly for the nearly atmosphere-free lunar environment, but I guess looking sleek counts for something. The cockpit is illuminated mostly in red light, likely for reasons of keeping pilots’ eyes able to see well into that lunar darkness, for the same reason that darkrooms use red light.
The controls, for 1968, I think are pretty prescient, as they rely a lot on color flat screens that actually feel somewhat modern. Display screens for computers existed in 1968, but were still quite uncommon, and I think Kubrick having to make displays not using existing computer tech but rather other analog methods actually helped, because the illusion is of very high resolution displays not unlike what we have today.
Alongside these high resolution screens we do still see some relics of the era in which this was made; specifically here those numerical display/buttons look to be made from Nixie tubes, based on their trademark Futura-like typography.
Okay, let’s get to the food in space part, because for some reason the details of this scene always stuck in my head. At some point in the trans-lunar trip, one of the very businesslike guys in the Moon Rocket Bus with Heywood Floyd (left) breaks out the space-cooler with spacewiches. There’s also lots of napkins on top, which is good, and suggests that the cooler isn’t damp inside.
Let’s look at these space sandwiches!
The sandwiches are perfect squares, stacked in twos, and wrapped in cellophane, unashamedly artificial-looking, very clearly mass-produced by some, I imagine, stainless steel machinery. I can imagine these being made in large sheets and then cut into a grid. The filling of the sandwiches is noted in the movie to be of at least two varieties, chicken and ham, though based on the way the cooler guy was looking for the ham one, I suspect other options were available.
In my mind, I pictured these sandwiches to be filled with something like chicken salad and ham salad instead of, say, sliced cold cut-style meats. Maybe there was tuna, too, or perhaps even a roast beef or Spam-like material or something like that. I imagined that these being on fairly soft bread, the filling somewhat moist (but not at the Wet Meat level), and being oddly good despite their unrepentant mass-produced nature.
The whole scene is really sort of odd but fits with the tone of the movie; these three men are casually drinking coffee (which is able to be poured in the 1/6th gravity of the moon, which I suppose should be possible?) and eating highly processed sandwiches while talking about a completely alien artifact discovered deliberately buried on the moon. This even is one of the greatest discoveries in human history and has the potential to change everything we know about life and our place in the universe, and these dudes are treating it like they found some slightly unexpected kind of rock amongst the other rock.
And yet somehow I find this scene appealing, almost cozy, somehow? I want to eat weird square sandwiches and talk calmly about alien artifacts while smoothly gliding over the surface of the moon on a glorified flying bus. Why? What’s wrong with me?
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