For the film, Kubrick built an exceptionally large model of the ship so that focus changes did not give away the true small size to the audience.

The spaceship first appears in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same name by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke.

He gave the ship a hypothetical thermonuclear propulsion system and added huge cooling fins to radiate away the excess heat produced.

In the book, Clarke says the fins "looked like the wings of some vast dragonfly" and that they gave the ship a "fleeting resemblance to an old-time sailing-ship".

In the film, Kubrick removed the fins because he thought that the audience might interpret them as wings giving the spacecraft the ability to fly through an atmosphere.

[citation needed] Early in the development of the film, Clarke and Kubrick considered having Discovery powered by an Orion type nuclear pulse propulsion system.

This was not an entirely new idea; in the 1951 Royal Wedding a similar arrangement allowed Fred Astaire to apparently dance up the walls and along the ceiling of his hotel room.

[6] Clarke believed that the ability to transfer between zero-g and artificial gravity areas of a spaceship would be easily learnt by astronauts, and this is how Kubrick portrayed it in the film.

[citation needed] In addition, a model of the ship's head and a few body segments were used for close-up shots of Discovery docked with the Leonov.

As described in the novel, it was originally intended to survey the Jovian system, but its mission was changed to go to Saturn and investigate the destination of the signal from the black monolith found at the crater Tycho.

After investigating alien artifacts at Saturn and Iapetus, the preliminary plan is for all five members of the crew to enter suspended animation for an indefinite period of time.

The ship's carousel is a spinning band of deck, mounted inside the crew compartment, using centrifugal force to simulate the effects of gravity and is the primary living and work area.

Discovery is described as a very large ship that could be handled by only two astronauts (David Bowman and Frank Poole), working 12 hour alternating shifts, along with the HAL 9000.

HAL's telescope reveals that the "Great Black Spot" is, in fact, a vast population of monoliths increasing at a geometric rate.

(The film accelerates the pace from the novel, both shortening Bowman's deadline from fifteen days, and making the spot grow faster.)

Through a mechanism that the novel only partially explains, these monoliths increase Jupiter's density until the planet achieves nuclear fusion, becoming a small star.