NASA Explains How It Would Build a Death Star

Do you want to build a real-life Death Star? You'll need to rope in an asteroid for that.

According to the chief engineer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brian Muirhead, it's more feasible to make one out of an existing asteroid as it could provide what you need to do the job.

"It could provide the metals," he explained to Wired. "You have organic compounds, you have water-all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star."

Considering Muirhead is currently working on the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which involves landing on an asteroid, collecting a piece of it, and launching it on the moon's orbit, it appears he definitely knows what he's talking about. Which means the Empire's creation of the gigantic planet extinguishers from scratch seem to be truly a work best fleshed out in fiction. Science fiction, to be exact.

"The Empire is doing things the hard way; using an asteroid to build a Death Star would require much less work, as metals and organic compounds would already be there," MailOnline pointed out.

Talk about "Star Wars"-related topics is expected to rise these days (and probably in the coming weeks) as the upcoming installment of the film franchise is set to be released in a week's time. A NASA engineer talking about making Death Stars appear to be part of the wave of anticipation for "The Force Awakens."

Further, a new stream of "Star Wars" footage is seen to fan the flames even more. Despite the presence of a number of clips teasing the upcoming flick, the major plots of the movie remain pretty much mysterious.

Recently, director J.J. Abrams revealed how they pieced together the script for "The Force Awakens." He and fellow writers Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt were working on a script when they realized they needed less time to finish it. Sans Arndt, they ended up wiping the slate clean and started from scratch. However, Abrams was clear on what he wanted to retain in the new script.

"I know I want this young woman to be at the center of this thing," he told io9. "I know I want this Stormtrooper to abandon his post."

"There are just fundamental tenets of what we had come up with [with Arndt] that were gonna stick," he added.

As such, he remarked he had to go backward to go forward with the script.

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