Corrected entry: As the Pan-Am shuttle is approaching the spinning space station there as a shot of it from within the hub based dock. The star filled background is spinning as it ought to, but the shuttle, which is not yet centered on the dock, is seen swinging across the sky independent of the background. To do this the craft would be tracing a spiral through space.
Vader47000
24th Nov 2002
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
19th Jul 2010
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Corrected entry: In the scene where we see the Moonbus landing at the Tycho Excavation Base, its descent engines raise dust that billows rather than falling in an arc straight back to the ground as would normally be the case in a vacuum. (00:50:35)
Correction: Previously posted and corrected. This is an accepted film technique, not a mistake. You cannot film in a vacuum.
Vacuum chambers certainly existed at the time. NASA tested Apollo spacecraft in them. It may have been difficult, but it certainly would have been feasible to film models in a vacuum at the time. Further, why should an "accepted film technique" forgive an obvious mistake in physics. If anything, it would be an intentional mistake if there was no way to simulate the effect of dust in a vacuum.
Correction: Dust particles will billow out in the manner we see if they have gas molecules to bounce off. Normally on the moon they have no such thing but in this case they do - the exhaust plume of the landing spacecraft. Until it slowly dissipates it will react with the dust molecules just like an atmosphere does.
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Correction: We see it comes from one side, swinging across to the other as it tries to line up directly in front of the target. This is like driving a car from across three lanes of traffic to tailgate a truck - you will likely swerve a little too far and have to correct your position once or twice. In 3 dimensions, plus a 4th dimension of moving space as they orbit the moon, this becomes triply difficult to do. So yes, they'd be tracing a spiral, but take a soda can and spin it while flipping it end-over-end, and visualize how the opening tab moves through space - a 3-D spiral.
The shuttle would be tracing the spiral from the point of view of the station's docking bay, with the eccentricity of the spiral declining as it got closer until it were aligned with the docking bay. The point in the original post is not that the ship wouldn't be in a spiral from the POV of the station, it's that in order to appear flying in a straight line independent of the background from the station POV, the ship would have to be flying in an erratic corkscrew flight path that precisely matched the rotation of the backdrop of the stars. This is unlikely. The shuttle would simply need to rotate along its central axis to match the station's rotation until it docked. In the truck analogy, from the POV of the truck the swerving car would appear to be driving erratically, not in the straight line that would be analogous to the shuttle's approach.
Vader47000