When rebel scum have managed to blow up your moon-sized, planet evaporating, mega-weapon, and you find out your galactic insurance does not cover weapons of mass destruction, what is an evil empire with a budget to do? How about building your new Death Star from an asteroid? That’s the way one NASA engineer said he’d go about it.

In an interview with Wired, Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said rather than building a Death Star out of thin air (err, thin void-of-space), you should use an asteroid as your foundation.

“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,” he said, “It could provide the metals. You have organic compounds, you have water–all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star.”

With this cost-cutting measure might be time to ask the White House to reconsider its “no Death Star policy.” Although, as our own resident science expert Kyle Hill explained, it might still be a little unreasonable to ask for one.

Muirhead is a part of the NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission, which after further investigation is not a real life recreation of the Bruce Willis movie Armageddon, but don’t worry, what they are doing is amazing nonetheless. They are going to “land on asteroid” and “pick up a boulder from the surface” and “put it in orbit around the moon.” They will then send a manned mission to visit it and bring back samples, around 2023.

Uh, wow.

Make sure you watch the whole video, because he about some other cool space travel things, like ion propulsion, and the power that the Millennium Falcon must use to make such sharp turns at high speeds.

Besides a Death Star, what other technology from Star Wars would you like to see science tackle? Tell us below.

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HT: Wired
Image: Lucasfilm