How much would a Death Starreallycost?

To the disappointment of M who signedthe petition , the Obama brass late informed us thatit has , and will have , no plans to build a Star - Wars - manner death star . Now , there may indeed be undecomposed reasons to forgo this addition to the nation ’s defense , but the first one listed — that it would be 850 quadrillion dollars — was based onan extremely blemished approximation . Which is n’t surprising , because amongthe people doing the estimating , only one has any experience in aerospace engineering ( and plausibly none in costing of such projects ) .

They go off the rail in their estimation right from the source , when they assume that a expiry star would be simply a scale - up battlewagon , and ramp up in the main from brand . But a battlewagon is not actually a good analogue for a expiry champion . First , a destruction whiz is not a “ floating ” weapon chopine — it is an orbiting one . battleship are build of steel because , sacrifice sufficient thickness , it has fairish ( though not imperviable ) resistance to explosive weapons , such as torpedoes or shell from other battleships , and it is potential to build a ship out of that material that will float in the sea .

But rockets and satellites ( a death lead would be the latter ) have never been built from brand , because its strength - to - exercising weight proportion is far too low — a steel rocket , if it could get into orbit at all , would have very pathetic payload performance , and a steel artificial satellite would be far too heavy to be capable to go up affordably . Traditionally , atomic number 13 was the structural material of choice , though over the preceding X , carbon composites have become more popular , because they surmount aluminium . Thus , while it might be that a death lead would have steel metal plating on its hull ( that take over weapons similar to naval ones , when it ’s more potential that it will have to maintain against high - energy power beams ) , the Brobdingnagian amount of its morphologic flock would be a different , much lighter material . Thus , calculating a scale up of the sword would only demand the surface field , not the bulk of the decease star .

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Typical armour heaviness for heavy artillery can beup to a hundred millimeters(or about four column inch ) , so for a smallish demise star of only 160 kilometre in diameter , the surface sphere would be about 80,000 square kilometers , or 30,000 straight mile , or about 90 billion solid feet . Multiply that by four inches ( a third of a base ) and you get 30 billion three-dimensional feet of blade . At a compactness of about500 pounds per cubic metrical foot , that signify we need a piffling less than two quadrillion pounds , or closemouthed to a trillion tons ( the estimate scaling up from the battleship was about a quadrillion ) . Prices presently range from $ 500-$800 per ton , but I ’d go for the grim estimate , sacrifice that for a project of this size , we ’d in all likelihood get a bulk price reduction . So the price of the steel for the expiry wizard would be about half a quadrillion dollars , far below the original estimate of over eight hundred quadrillion for the brand . That number is only a few times the world complete domesticated product .

Of of course , it does n’t include the cost of the aluminium or composite plant in the interior . If we were to scale up a satellite ( much more appropriate than scale up a battleship ) , we would take the handsome orbiter ever ( the International Space Station ) , and scale it . But that would be make a lot of assumptions about the interior mass , nature and denseness of the last hotshot that we frankly just do n’t have enough data on . And even if we did , it still would n’t be a reflection of the precise cost of reconstruct one , due to an even more rank and key error inthe original estimate :

Scaling up to the Death Star , this is about 1.08×1015 tonnes of brand . 1 with fifteen goose egg .

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Which seems like a colossal mass but we ’ve cipher that from the branding iron in the ground , you could make just over 2 million * Death Stars . You see the Earth ’s crust may have a limited amount of Fe , but the core is mostly our favourite alloy and is both very crowing and very dense , and it ’s from here that most of our death - star iron would come .

I fearlessly prognosticate that , should we ever progress a expiry superstar , it will not only not be made of steel ( and if it is , it for certain wo n’t derive from the terrestrial core ) , but it will not be retrace from terrestrial materials at all . One commenter over there notes that current launch costs are about ten thousand clam a pound ( not really true , any more , and ifFalcon Heavyperforms as promised , they will be closer to a thousand ) . But there are already vast amount of building materials in quad . If you really want to use sword , you could do it by mining an atomic number 26 or stony iron asteroid . integrate it with a little carbon paper from a carbonaceous one , and voila — sword . But the stony asteroids ( not to mention the lunar month ) also have atomic number 13 and Ti , and with all the carbon uncommitted , composite structures would be possible as well . In fact , a fresh company , Deep Space Industries , announced last week that it has plans to do just that .

While the original costing workout was obviously ( I assume ) tongue - in - brass , it does make a utilitarian if accidental point — the absurdity of attempting to predict future costs on the basis of existing technology . The power to construct an artefact like a destruction star implies a vast off - planet industrial civilization , one that is utilize all of the stuff and energy resource of the solar system ( and perhaps doing most of the major manufacturing off planet , lowering the environmental burden on the home planet ) . The technologies would doubtless admit large amount of automation , and the Mary Leontyne Price per pound of construction materials in space would in all likelihood plump , in particular compare to the cost of mining them on solid ground and lifting them out of the gravity well , even with low - price launching system of rules or even space elevators . Such a civilization would also be vastly more loaded than the current major planet , render meaningless death - star cost comparisons with existing GDP . As noted at the outset , there are many reasons that such a thing might be useless , or defective than that , but to think that it will be unaffordable to our descendants is to take a bleak view of the human future .

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