Clavius Base

Clavius Base is a fictional lunar settlement in the Space Odyssey literary universe created by Arthur C. Clarke.

The base, located at Clavius crater, is featured in both the novel and film versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to the novel, the base was finished in 1994 by United States Astronautical Engineering Corps. If necessary, the base can be self-sustaining.

As depicted on screen, Clavius Base features some surface features (a landing pad and control tower, together with other ancillary support structures), but the vast majority of the base is located beneath the Lunar surface to protect it from micro-meteoroid impacts and solar radiation. Incoming spacecraft set down on a landing platform beneath a dome which opens as the vessel descends. The landing platform is part of an enormous elevator, which lowers the spacecraft into a cavernous docking bay, illuminated in red.

Although not a reuse of the Clavius model, Moonbase Alpha from the TV series Space: 1999 is designed using the same concept as Clavius. It is located in another crater, Plato.

Clavius Base is, apparently, the central focus of American activities on the Moon, and is under the control of the United States Astronautics Agency.

Clavius Base was placed under a quarantine with the cover story of an epidemic when the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly TMA-1 artifact was excavated. Dr. Heywood R. Floyd traveled to the base to investigate the monolith about 18 months prior to the departure of the spacecraft Discovery on her mission to Jupiter (in the novel, Saturn).

While present at the base, Dr. Floyd met with American lunar officials and notified them that the government was requiring individual security oaths to be taken from each individual on the base.

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