Dr. Heywood Floyd, head of the National Council of Astronautics is a prominent character in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He also appears in 2010: Odyssey Two as one of the astronauts who returns to Jupiter to find out what happened. Story follows the movie plot, Discovery travels to Jupiter. Part 6: 2006.
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Floyd's past life made a return when he was contacted by Dr. Walter Curnow, head engineer for the Discovery II construction project. The NCA had originally planned for Discovery II to be a larger version of Discovery, controlled by an upgraded HAL-9100 computer. However, the NCA were understandably not keen on another HAL controlled spacecraft. This meant a complete redesign of the Discovery II computer system and this was causing endless delays. After they had finally got funding to restart construction of Discovery II they were planning a completion date of 2008. However, it looked like there was going to be a delay of at least one year, possibly two, on this date. In the mean time the Russians were building a new spacecraft, rumoured to be called "Cosmonaut Gherman Titov". There was a mysterious Chinese space station under construction called "Tsien".
Floyd did what he could to advise Curnow with his problems. After this the NCA would start to call him for advice, first it was monthly but then Dr. Milson and his former colleagues were calling weekly, Floyd was grateful for the inconvenience of the time difference.