A NASA scientist says the best way to build a Death Star is to make one out of an asteroid.
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A NASA engineer recently explained that the best way to build a Death Star, as seen in ‘Star Wars, ‘ is to begin with something that’s already there, such as an asteroid.
“It could provide the metals, the organic compounds, you have water”, he says. Personally, I’d rather build the asteroid space station from Greg Bear’s Eon than the Death Star. “You went and got an asteroid and built it from that”, he said in WIRED.
In order to navigate an asteroid field, the spacecraft that would deliver the boulder-grabbing machine needs the ability to sense something ahead and react quickly – a capability that the Millennium Falcon of “Star Wars” seems to have nailed down.
He cited NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, which involves landing on an asteroid and extracting a portion of it back into the moon’s orbit. While there, astronauts will collect samples of the asteroid’s surface for later analysis. Sure, that’s nowhere close to creating a Death Star, but he sure do knows a thing or two about asteroids.
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This just goes to show that science fiction is becoming more concerned with using real science, as the Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens has been revealed to be an ice planet that was carved into a superweapon capable of destroying entire star systems.
