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posted by CoolHand on Monday December 14 2015, @05:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the fully-armed-and-operation-battle-station dept.

NASA's Brian Muirhead has speculated about the best way to construct a "Death Star" or other weaponized space station:

The best way to build a Death Star is to construct one out of an already-existing asteroid, says Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It could provide the metals," he says. "You have organic compounds, you have water—all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star."

And Muirhead knows a thing or two about asteroids. He's actually working on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will land on an asteroid, collect a piece, and then place it in orbit around the moon. A crewed mission will then go collect samples from that chunk while it's in orbit. (OK, so it's not quite building a Death Star, but it's still pretty cool.)

The Wired article includes a video.


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  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday December 14 2015, @07:45PM

    by davester666 (155) on Monday December 14 2015, @07:45PM (#276280)

    I think SOMEONE might notice that the moon was being completely terraformed into a death star, just with the space ships going back and forth ferrying workers around, nevermind materials. Even if they only worked on the far side of our moon and then planned to rotate it 180 degrees to fire at us.

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