Clavius Base

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Clavius Base
Clavius, Moon
Type Moon base
Site history
Built1994
Built byUnited States Astronautical Engineering Corps

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

Contents

Clavius Base

The base, located at Clavius crater, is featured in both the 1968 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 has 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.

Clavius is the main base on the moon, and jointly run by American and Russian administration. [1]

Events at Clavius Base

Clavius was placed under a quarantine with the cover story of an epidemic when the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly TMA-1 artefact was excavated. Dr. Heywood R. Floyd travelled 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, Floyd met with American lunar officials and notified them that as part of the investigation into the Monolith the government was requiring security oaths to be taken from each individual on the base. He then departed for the crater Tycho on the Moonbus to see the Monolith, and as a result witnessed its unveiling to sunlight.

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References

  1. "The picturesque booths were only a few yards from a barrier with two entrances labeled WELCOME TO THE U.S. SECTION and WELCOME TO THE SOVIET SECTION ... There was a rather pleasant symbolism about the fact that as soon as they had passed through the barriers, in either direction, passengers were free to mix again. The division was purely for administrative purposes."