NASA Engineer: How To Build A Death Star
A NASA engineer has revealed how to efficiently build the Death Star from Star Wars.
The fictional megastructure and galactic superweapon of the film is around 60 miles in diameter and was known as the Galactic Empire's "ultimate weapon".
Brian Muirhead said the Empire did things the hard way - by shooting materials out from a planet and building it in space.
Instead, it could have simply repurposed an asteroid as the metals and organic compounds would already be there.
He told Wired that as an asteroid contains metals, organic compounds and water it has "all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star".
Mr Muirhead works on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will see a robot land on an asteroid and collect a boulder from the surface.
The boulder will then be placed into orbit around the moon and later collected by a crew of astronauts who will take samples.
The landing is expected to happen in 2023.