How to Build a Death Star According to a NASA Engineer

(dramatic orchestral music)

I went to see the first Star Wars movie in June of 1977.

The thing that I still remember best is the opening

sequence where the Imperial class Star Destroyer

is moving across the screen, and my first thought was,

What society had the capability

to build a machine of such grand size?

(dramatic orchestral music)

If one wanted to build a Death Star,

you didn't build it by launching

a bunch of stuff off a planet.

You went and got yourself an asteroid

and built it from that.

Could provide the metals, you have organic compounds,

you have water, all the building blocks you would need

to build your famed Death Star.

On my Asteroid Redirect Mission,

we're gonna go land on an asteroid.

[C-3P0] This is suicide!

There's nowhere to go.

[Han] That looks pretty good.

We're gonna go pick up a boulder from the surface,

put it in orbit around the moon.

We'll go visit it with a crewed mission

and bring back samples.

We would land there in about 2023.

[Leia] You're not actually going into an asteroid field?

They'd be crazy to follow us, wouldn't they?

The ability to sense that something's ahead of you

and react so quickly, that's a hard problem.

Never tell me the odds.

Flying quickly through an asteroid field's a problem.

Flying more slowly through an asteroid field,

yes, you absolutely can do that.

We have Dawn that's flying through the main-belt asteroids.

There's a lot of space between them

and we can fly through them.

The key technology behind all that is ion propulsion,

which, of course, is the propulsion for sublight spacecraft

in the Star Wars series.

We actually have four ion engines

on the Asteroid Redirect Mission.

That's an ion engine.

Obviously, those engines have to be very maneuverable.

Something that massive, to turn like that,

takes a lot of force,

so you need really powerful engines to do that.

Ion engines today, they're very low thrust.

If you wanted to start going to the stars,

you need much more advanced power,

so that's where you start talking about

fission and then fusion.

That's really one of the power systems that Star Wars use.

(dramatic orchestral music) (growling)

(starship engine roars)