Io Facility

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Warning! This page contains information regarding new Star Trek material, and thus may contain spoilers.

The Io Facility was a top secret Starfleet Section 31 construction hangar located in orbit of the Jovian moon Io at coordinates 23.17.46.11 in the Sol system. Shuttlecraft could enter the interior bay of the large enclosed drydock when panel sections on the side of the dock were rotated and moved out of the way. The Dreadnought-class starship USS Vengeance was constructed at the facility and launched in 2259 under the command of Admiral Alexander Marcus.

Before the launch, Montgomery Scott piloted a shuttlecraft into the interior of the facility after Captain James T. Kirk asked him to investigate the hangar's spatial coordinates supplied by Khan Noonien Singh. Scott was able to stow away aboard the USS Vengeance before it departed from the hangar. (Star Trek Into Darkness)

The facility was only referred to as a "construction hangar" in the film. The name "Io Facility" comes from a non-canon Starfleet Top Secret Security Review. Khan, in the guise of John Harrison, had been stationed there. [1] A concept illustration of the facility can be viewed here.

According to the novelization of the film, the facility's proximity to Jupiter's magnetosphere and Io's plasma torus caused spectrum distortions and upper hybrid resonance instabilities. These phenomena affected scanning and allowed Scotty's shuttle to remain undetected by the facility.