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I found your 2001 timeline very interesting. Of course one of the biggest problems is to decide what is "canon", the movie or book. The book was written prior to final filming and differs considerably from the movie, mainly the final destination of Discovery.

In the movie there never was any mention that the mission to Jupiter was one way requiring a back-up rescue mission. In the book a mission to Jupiter was mentioned but changed instead to Saturn and the saturnian moon Japetus where Clarke placed a huge monolith on its surface. For this reason I can understand a one-way trip since the amount of fuel planned may have been suffecient for return from Jupiter but not from Saturn and would have required extensive ship re-design, perhaps pushing a launch date back several years or more.

Also in the movie we have no idea how big the monolith circling Jupiter was. A huge monolith was in the book and used in 2010 movie. In a stroke of genius Kubrick was able to make the end of the movie reflect the beginning by eliminating all dialog after the pre-recorded mission briefing and still keep the story moving. The statement by Bowman about " its full of stars" was never in the movie.

I have also wondered about the three hibernating astronauts. We know that they had separate special training apart from Poole and Bowman, who only knew the official cover story. The true mission was to go to Jupiter and discover and make contact with whatever the monolith had sent a signal to. Therefore the three hibernating astronauts were trained for a first contact mission without being told that it was one? That's the part I have trouble with. I can understand HAL getting rid of them thinking that they would mess up the mission and that he was the only qualified one to make contact. I just think it would have made a little more sense to have it in the pre-recorded message that the three hibernating astronauts knew the true purpose of the mission.

Also I wonder about the amount of time needed to excavate the monolith and I think that the 14 day lunar night isn't enough time. I think the monolith was partially uncovered during the day when they were only expecting to find a buried meteorite and then more equipment was brought in resulting in the final TMA-1 site seen in the movie. The reason the monolith didn't trigger at first was that it was made to only respond when fully exposed to sunlight. This would indicate that intelligience had arisen enough on the planet to travel to its moon, detect the magnetic field of the mobolith and dig it up and signal the next phase of the experiment.

I agree that it can be dificult and fun to create a time line and also that 2010 should be comepletely igored as a mediocre work that trashes what Kubrick and Clarke created.

In this forum there are several threads where people using existing knowledge about spaceflight that didn't exist in 1966 have speculated about how things would have been done and worked in "reality".

One subject that has arsien is the conventional wisdom that the Discovery spaceship was constructed in Earth orbit. Knowing what we now about lifting mass up from a large gravity well like the Earth I have postulated the Discovery and other ships were constucted in lunar orbit. I base this on the extensive construction seen at Calvius during the Aires landing scenes. It would be far easier to pre-fab the modules and lift them into orbit using a solar powered mass driver. Also the Discovery suggests modular construction implying that smaller and similar ships had been constructed there for exploration of the inner planets.

The info about lunar mining is very interesting. I have stated before that science fiction often doesn't go far enough in realizing what is possible.

Other variations by Clarke include the entire crew waking up and being transported along with the ship to another world where they meet humanoid aliens in a classic sci-fi scenario. Also the HAL 9000 computer was at one point called Athena after the greek goddess.

Personally I think the Kubrick version is the best. He stated that anything we can relate to is by definition an extension of ourselves and wanted something totally alien and outside outside our realm of experiences. So that at the end of the journey we have a totally shattered mentally Bowman being set down in the room of a four star hotel with no doors or windows while distorted alien voices watch him age until finally near death he is transformed into the Starchild.

It should also be stated that Clarke patterned 2001 after Homer's Odyssey. Like Odysseus Bowman was the only one to return from his voyage. But I don't think he did what Odysseus did when he returned to Ithaca. But to quote the book, Bowman/Starchild would think of something.