NASA Engineer Says It Would Be Easier To Build A Death Star On Asteroid

NASA Engineer Says It Would Be Easier To Build A Death Star On Asteroid - Ahead of the premiere of the new Star Wars film, a chief NASA Engineer has told the publication Wired that it would be more efficient to build a Death Star, a.k.a. a mobile space station on top of an existing asteroid than building one out of thin air, or using planets or larger objects, like for example, Pluto or moons in the outer Solar System.

But first, what is a Death Star?

For readers who are not familiar with Star Wars, Death Star is a fictional humongous space station in the franchise that can instantly burn a planet, e.g. Earth, using a super-laser. Some super fans of the franchise suggest that the galactic sphere is also a power source, as in a developed and self-sufficient energy source. 

In a 2014 article in Medium, Science journalist Ethan Siegel says a Death Star, before it can destroy a planet, must first have an internal unknown source of energy at its core - and from a Physics point of view, the Empire’s blueprint is actually catastrophically inefficient.

And speaking of inefficiency, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Chief Engineer Brian Muirhead spoke with Wired this week to discuss how humans in distant future would efficiently build its own Death Star - and the best way is to catch an existing asteroid in the Solar System, and construct one on top of it.

Muirhead, the Chief Engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory at Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says asteroids normally contain all the metals needed for construction, in addition to organic compounds and water that builders would need while constructing one.

Engineer Muirhead’s interview is indirectly promoting the Star Wars “Force Awakens” film, apparently, but it is also spreading the news about NASA’s grand plan to land machines on a moving asteroid. The program is called Asteroid Redirect Mission, and its main aim is to safely land a spacecraft on a small asteroid, capture a small rock from it, and safely bring it to a much larger platform, e.g., the moon.

“On my Asteroid Redirect Mission, we’re gonna go land on an asteroid. We’re gonna pick up a boulder from the surface and put it in orbit around the moon,” Engineer Muirhead explains. “It (the boulder itself) will be visited by a crewed mission and bring back (to Earth) some samples,” he adds.

The target date of the mission is by year 2023.

Apparently, the Asteroid Redirect Mission’s goal is not to create a Death Star. Instead, it’s looking to help manned (and unmanned) missions to Mars. These rocks, according to NASA, would serve as docking stations, and the mission itself will help them develop better technology for Martian missions, like for instance, new space suits and space propulsion systems.

NASA said in a statement in March that future human missions to the Red Planet will require new capabilities to “rendezvous and dock spacecraft in deep space.” They’re planning to develop the system used with the International Space Station, or ISS. Source: StGist

 

SHARE