Fred Ordway, scientist who worked on 'Space Odyssey' film, dies at 87

The pulp science-fiction magazine was left by a maid in his family's Upper East Side apartment.

Fred Ordway picked it up, and knew from that moment what he would grow up to be.

Ordway, 87, died July 1 in Huntsville, Alabama. His family gave no cause of death.

He devoured science-fiction magazines -- chronicles of flying saucers, green aliens and Buck Rogers.

His fascination would propel him into the inner circle of leading American aeronautical scientists, working alongside Wernher von Braun at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Born when ice was still delivered by horse cart, Ordway joined teams that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.

And then, having seen his childhood fantasies made real, Ordway tended to the next generation's fantasies: He served as technical adviser on Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic film, "2001: A Space Odyssey." That film's mesmerizing power owes much to Ordway.

Ordway was a friend of Arthur Clarke -- whose fiction inspired the film -- and ensured that what the movie "claimed about this idealized world had some validity to it," said Benjamin Bratton, a visual arts professor at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego.

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Details that might have been glossed over in other movies were painstakingly reproduced frame by frame in Kubrick's masterpiece -- a floating pen, for example, and Velcro slippers worn by space flight attendants to keep them from drifting upward.

Without these "little touches," the movie risked being dismissed as just a "spacey, hippie-dippie, psychedelic fantasy," said Sheldon Brown, director of the Clarke Center.

Instead, the film's transcendence is achieved in part by its juxtaposition of heady themes with minute detail, many of them provided by Ordway. Lovingly choreographed scenes of an astronaut moving from weightlessness to microgravity help ground the film even as its larger themes ascend to heights of abstraction, Brown said.

Ordway was born in Manhattan on April 4, 1927, the only son of a wealthy banking family. He received an engineering degree from Harvard and served in the Air Force Reserve after World War II before joining the burgeoning rocket industry.