Star Trek: Every* Starbase Ranked Worst To Best

Starbase One was designed to be Star Trek's first, therefore oldest, starbase. It was introduced in Star Trek: Discovery, although its story was altered and updated when it became the primary base of Strange New Worlds.

According to Strange New Worlds, the station was built around seed pods that had been sent out into space. These pods housed forests that had grown too large to be returned to Earth, thereby creating a floating habitat in space. It is this configuration that the audience sees in Strange New Worlds. 

However, its first appearance in Discovery showed the station without those seed pods. This turned out to be a very good thing, as it had been discovered that the station was overrun with Klingons. This, at the height of the Klingon War, could have been disastrous, and in fact, it very nearly was, with the loss of roughly 80,000 lives to the House of D'Ghor.

The station was then moved. Initially, it was located in the furthest reaches of our solar system, though it was floating over Jupiter barely a year or two later. It has gone from a heavily damaged facility to become one of the most respected and venerated structures in Starfleet.