A while back I made some preliminary “General Plans” for Space Station V from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Some 19 sets were sent out; the feedback I received was positive, so it’s likely that I will revise these and do another release. Obviously sets of such “Booklets of General Plans” would be of greatest interest for the spacecraft of 2001… the Orion and the Discovery seem likely to be of greater interest than the Space Station. But what I am (very, very casually) working on is Clavius Base. Why? Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps because it’s something others haven’t really tackled in the past. Perhaps because of the dearth of info, it’s more of a challenge. And perhaps because, as potentially dull as a moonbase is compared to a spaceship, Clavius Base represents a *vast* engineering undertaking far exceeding any mere spacecraft in terms of cost, effort and achievement.

Clavius Base is shown only twice in the movie… once through the windows of the Aries Ib, and once from the viewpoint of a trio of astronauts standing on a ridge, cliff or hill, the base stretched out below and behind them. A few photos of the model are available, such as in Adam Johnsons “2001: the Lost Science,” which I heartily recommend. It is this model photo that served as the basis of my preliminary reconstruction. The photo is taken from a shallow angle; fortunately it is built with a series of concentric circular structures meaning that with some photoshoppery, perspective adjustments can be made to produce a fairly decent plan view of the base. With that plan view created, I imported it into a CAD program and traced out the broad strokes of the geometry. And once I had that, I imported a screenshot from the movie from the “ridge” view and adjusted the angle and perspective of the CAD diagram until it matched, to reasonable approximation, the view of the base seen behind the astronauts. That gave me the position in terms of angle, distance and elevation for the astronauts viewpoint, as well as producing a line on the ground where the Aries 1B landing pad must be. The result is that the base seems to be *real* close to a tall surface feature… hill, cliff, whatever. As this is Hollywood, I am willing to fudge things somewhat; as this is 2001, I’m willing to fudge things only as far as needed. So perhaps I’m comfortable with moving the hillside another fifty percent further away than shown here. At a stretch, twice as far. But that’s really pushing it.

The bigger issue is scale. If I knew how high up on that hillside the astronauts are, I’d know exactly how big the base is. But numbers seem to be utterly lacking. So… while the Aries Ib landing facility can be scaled reasonably precisely, since it is seen in-scale with the Aries Ib, the base itself will have to be guesstimated. Mainly by assuming the smallest structures visible are sized to serve as meaningfully useful buildings. Careful examination of the available model photos might give hints of scale based on the heights of multi-story structures.

Yes, yes, I know…