Death Star

• 1. Introduction

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  The Death Star is a fictional space station built by the Galactic Empire to end rebellions by destroying entire worlds. In the 1977 film Star Wars, Governor Tarkin orders it to fire on Alderaan, the home world of Princess Leia. The blast wipes out the entire planet as a demonstration of the Empire's resolve. Before the Rebel Alliance learned its official designation, its pilots simply called it the Planet Killer.

  That single act of destruction sits at the center of a design and production story spanning decades. How did a rough concept for a superweapon become the enormous sphere audiences finally saw on screen? What numbers, defenses and hidden flaws actually defined it? And once the Empire's ultimate weapon was destroyed, what took its place?

  That story of transformation, from rough sketches to a finished movie prop, starts with a little-known concept artist named Colin Cantwell.

• 2. Designing The Sphere

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  George Lucas's first outline for the Star Wars saga never placed the Death Star in the section that became the first film. When Lucas began developing that first act into a stand-alone feature, he pulled the space station concept forward from what had been the third act of his original story. Concept models built during production of the 1977 film shifted the superlaser's location several times. Even so, the station was always envisioned as a spherical space station over 100 kilometers in diameter.

  Lucas gave the original design job to concept artist and spaceship modeler Colin Cantwell. Cantwell had earlier worked with director Stanley Kubrick on the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the documentary Empire of Dreams, Cantwell said the Death Star was originally meant to be a perfect sphere. The physical model was built in two separate pieces that did not fit together as planned. To hide the seam, the team decided to add a trench circling the station's equator, and Lucas liked the result. The finished Death Star model was built by John Stears.

  That buzzing countdown sound before the superlaser fires was borrowed from the old Flash Gordon serials. Portraying an incomplete but still powerful space station created new problems for Industrial Light and Magic's modelmakers. They faced this challenge while building the second Death Star model for Return of the Jedi. Only the front side of that 137 centimeter model was ever finished, so the crew flipped the image horizontally to complete the shot. Both Death Stars on screen were ultimately built from a mix of complete models, sectional models and matte paintings.

  The station's motion and blasts on screen, though, needed a different kind of trick entirely, one built not from miniatures but from computer code.

• 3. Tricks Of Light And Scale

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  Larry Cuba built the grid-plan animation shown during the Rebel briefing before the assault on the Death Star in A New Hope. Working alongside computer graphics researcher Tom DeFanti at the University of Illinois Chicago, Cuba created an actual computer graphics simulation rather than a filmed prop. George Lucas recruited Cuba for the project after seeing his and Gary Imhoff's earlier computer work with CalArts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  After filming wrapped, crews planned to throw away the original Death Star model along with one of its surface setpieces. Both were salvaged instead of scrapped. The Death Star explosions in the Special Edition of A New Hope and in Return of the Jedi use a technique called the Praxis Effect. In that technique, a flat ring of matter bursts outward from the blast.

  None of those visual tricks explain just how much destructive power the finished station was said to carry.

• 4. Anatomy Of A Planet Killer

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  Commanded by Governor Tarkin, the original Death Star was described in the film as the Galactic Empire's ultimate weapon. It was a spherical battle station 160 kilometers in diameter. A single shot from its superlaser was enough to destroy an entire planet. On screen it carried the technical name DS-1 Orbital Battle Station; the Rogue One film also refers to it as Project Stardust. According to Star Wars reference materials, the completed superlaser produced a blast with a power output of 6.2x10 to the power 32 joules per second.

  Star Wars reference books put the Death Star's population at 1.7 million military personnel, 400,000 maintenance droids and 250,000 civilian contractors and catering staff. Defending the station were thousands of turbolasers, ion cannons and laser cannons. It also carried a complement of seven to nine thousand TIE fighters and tens of thousands of support craft. Its docking bays were large enough for entire Star Destroyers.

  All of that firepower and personnel could not stop a single stolen set of schematics from finding the station's one true weakness.

• 5. The Assault That Ended It

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  Princess Leia opens the story by carrying the Death Star's stolen schematics toward the Rebel Alliance. She hopes the plans will reveal a way to destroy the station. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Obi-Wan Kenobi, C-3PO and R2-D2 are traveling toward Alderaan aboard the Millennium Falcon. A tractor beam pulls their ship aboard the station instead. Once inside, they manage to find and free Princess Leia. As the group escapes, Obi-Wan Kenobi sacrifices himself while dueling Darth Vader so the others can flee.

  Luke Skywalker later returns as part of a fighter squadron sent to attack the station's one weak point. Stolen schematics had revealed a ray-shielded particle exhaust vent leading directly from the surface into the reactor core. Luke fires his X-wing's torpedoes into that vent, striking the core and setting off a chain-reaction explosion. The blast destroys the Death Star just before it can fire on the Rebel base on the moon Yavin 4.

  Those stolen plans, and the vulnerability they exposed, had a far more secretive origin than the crew of the Millennium Falcon ever knew.

• 6. Secrets In The Blueprint

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  Long before Rogue One or Andor picked up the story, the Death Star's schematics already appear on screen on the planet Geonosis. That scene comes from Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones. The Geonosians designed those plans under Archduke Poggle the Lesser, a leader within the Confederacy of Independent Systems. By the end of Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, the station appears early in construction. A Clone Wars story reel from the unfinished Crystal Crisis on Utapau episodes adds one more detail. General Grievous traveled to Utapau before Revenge of the Sith to obtain an enormous kyber crystal for the superlaser.

  As shown in Rogue One and the novel Catalyst, a team of engineers built the Death Star's core technology on the rain-soaked world of Eadu. Orson Krennic, the Empire's Director of Advanced Weapons Research, oversaw the project, which was slowed by constant delays. Krennic forcibly recruited weapons designer Galen Erso, the father of the film's protagonist Jyn Erso, to finish the design. Erso's team learned to fuse shards of kyber crystal into larger structures, amplifying their energy into a single beam strong enough to destroy a planet.

  In the Disney+ series Andor, prisoners at the Imperial Prison Complex on Narkina 5 spend their shifts assembling small fasteners. Among them is Cassian Andor, working under the alias Keef Girgo. The post-credits scene of the first season's finale, titled Rix Road, reveals those fasteners were parts for the Death Star's superlaser all along.

  The second season of Andor centers on the Ghorman project, a covert program formed in 4 BBY under Krennic's direction. Its goal was suppressing the planet Ghorman with propaganda that justified the Empire's need to strip-mine it. The target mineral, kalkite, was used to coat the Death Star's reactor lenses. ISB Supervisor Dedra Meero, given control of the operation, deliberately let the local Ghorman Front resistance grow bolder to justify harsher Imperial crackdowns. That strategy culminated in the Ghorman Massacre in 2 BBY, when Imperial forces violently suppressed peaceful protesters in the planet's capital, Palmo. The massacre fully radicalized Senior Senator Mon Mothma, who publicly accused Palpatine of "unprovoked genocide." She also called him "the monster who will come for us all soon enough." Declared a traitor, Mothma escaped with help from Cassian Andor, and later from Gold Squadron and the Spectres. She then went on to formally organize the Rebel Alliance in a speech delivered over the planet Dantooine.

  Rogue One follows a small band of rebels operating under an improvised callsign as they set out to steal the Death Star plans. It is later revealed that Galen Erso had secretly sabotaged his own design, building a hidden vulnerability directly into the reactor. Tarkin first orders the Death Star to destroy Jedha City, both as retaliation for a local insurgency and as proof the station is fully operational. After the plans are stolen from the vault on Scarif, Tarkin fires the superlaser on the base. The blast kills Krennic, along with Jyn Erso and her fellow rebels. It turns out the superlaser draws on multiple reactors, letting the Empire vary its destructive power depending on the target. Both the strike on Jedha City and the one on Scarif used only a single reactor.

  None of that sabotage or secrecy mattered once the Empire started work on an even larger successor above the forest moon Endor.

• 7. A Second, Deadlier Design

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  Return of the Jedi, released in 1983, shows a second Death Star still under construction as it orbits the forest moon Endor. A shield generator based on that moon protects the unfinished station from attack. This design closed the vulnerability that had doomed the first Death Star. That left the Rebel Alliance with only one real option: destroy the station before it was finished.

  The Emperor and Darth Vader deliberately leak false information claiming the station's weapons are not yet operational. Their goal is to lure the Rebel fleet into a trap. In reality, the superlaser works perfectly, and it fires on and destroys Rebel capital ships once the Battle of Endor begins. On the moon's surface, a ground team led by Han Solo, working with the native Ewoks, manages to disable the shield generator protecting the station. With the shield down, Rebel pilots Wedge Antilles and Lando Calrissian fly into the station aboard Han's Millennium Falcon and fire on its reactor. The resulting explosion destroys the second Death Star.

  An early draft of Return of the Jedi actually featured two separate Death Stars at different stages of completion. The Star Wars Encyclopedia describes the second station's north pole as a heavily armored, 100-story tower topped by the Emperor's private observation chamber. Writers across the franchise have never agreed on its exact size. Some sources give it the same 160 kilometer radius as the first Death Star, while others claim a radius of 900 kilometers. The most recent figure, established in 2017 by author Ryder Windham, sets the second Death Star's radius at 200 kilometers.

  The 2015 novel Star Wars: Aftermath puts the second Death Star on its cover and returns repeatedly to flashbacks of its destruction. One of the book's main characters personally escapes the explosion, and the station's destruction is later replayed in holograms within the story. The 2015 comic Star Wars: Shattered Empire revisits the days after that destruction through the eyes of Poe Dameron's parents, both pilots during the battle. The video game Star Wars: Uprising is likewise set in the aftermath, showing a hologram of the station's description throughout its cutscenes.

  Part of the second Death Star's wreckage later reappears in The Rise of Skywalker, released in 2019, resting on the ocean moon Kef Bir. Rey travels to that wreckage searching for the Emperor's wayfinder, a device that points the way to his hidden lair on the planet Exegol.

  That single wrecked sphere on Kef Bir was far from the only successor the Death Star inspired.

• 8. Heirs, Rivals And Real-World Echoes

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  The Force Awakens, released in 2015, introduces Starkiller Base, a Death Star-like superweapon built by the First Order. Unlike either Death Star, this station is built from an existing planet called Ilum rather than assembled from scratch in deep space. It draws its firepower directly from a nearby star, and it can destroy multiple planets at once from extreme range. In the film, the First Order uses it to obliterate all five planets of the Hosnian Prime system, then the capital of the New Republic.

  Han Solo, Chewbacca and Finn exploit Starkiller Base's one weakness, a defensive shield that only blocks objects moving slower than light. By crossing that shield boundary at faster-than-light speed, the trio infiltrates the base and sabotages its shield generator. An X-wing assault led by Poe Dameron and Nien Nunb then destroys the superweapon by hitting its thermal oscillator and fuel cells. The planet's core releases so much energy that it implodes and collapses into a star as the Resistance flees.

  The name Starkiller Base actually pays homage to Luke Skywalker's original surname in early drafts of the first Star Wars film. In an unrelated coincidence, "Starkiller" is also the alias Darth Vader gives to Galen Marek in the 2008 game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

  In The Rise of Skywalker, the resurrected Darth Sidious reveals an entire fleet of superweapons built above the Sith planet Exegol. Each Xyston-class Star Destroyer in his Final Order carries its own axial superlaser, capable of destroying a planet on its own. Sidious uses one to destroy the planet Kijimi as a show of force. At the film's climax, the Resistance destroys the fleet by igniting each ship's onboard superlaser, setting off its reactor one by one. The Resistance also destroys the Star Destroyer Steadfast and the navigation signal the fleet needed to leave the planet.

  Outside the films, the name has stuck to real objects and institutions. AT&T Corporation's logo, designed by Saul Bass and introduced in 1982, is informally nicknamed the Death Star. The Ars Technica website used that same nickname while criticizing one of the company's data policies. SportsRadio station KTCK in Dallas first applied the term to the Cowboys' new stadium, now known as AT&T Stadium, in Arlington, Texas.

  That same nickname eventually reached the United States government itself. In 2012, a petition on the White House website asked officials to fund construction of a real Death Star as a jobs program.