You have organic compounds, you have water – all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star.” You would get yourself an asteroid and built it from that.” “If you wanted to build a Death Star, you wouldn’t build it by launching a bunch of stuff off a planet. He remembers wondering what kind of society would be capable of building such a colossal and advanced machine.Īsteroid has all the ingredients to make a Death Star

What he remembers best is the opening sequence, when an imperial-class star destroyer was moving across the screen. Muirhead says he saw his first Star Wars film in June 1977. It was a moon-sized deep space mobile battle station that boasted a primary weapon with enough firepower to destroy a whole planet with a single shot. It was previously known as the Ultimate Weapon and Sentinel Base. The Death Star, also known as the First Death Star, Death Star I, and DS-1 platform. Muirhead, who has worked on several technology and spacecraft projects since joining the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1978, including the Shuttle Imaging Radar-C and the Galileo mission to Jupiter, says the most effective way to build a Death Star would be to construct one on an asteroid – using the raw materials contained within it.

But the Emperor and Imperial officers like Grand Moff Tarkin underestimated the tenacity of the Rebel Alliance, who refused to bow to this technological terror.” If you want to make a Death Star like the one in Star Wars, you don’t do so out of thin air, like the movie-makers claimed, but from asteroids, says Brian Muirhead, Chief Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).Īccording to “The Death Star was the Empire’s ultimate weapon: a moon-sized space station with the ability to destroy an entire planet.

Star wars asteroid base