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A Nasa engineer has proposed a method to efficiently build a Death Star, and it's not the way the Empire would have done it.

Instead of constructing the massive weapon from nothing, by shooting materials out from a planet, an asteroid could be used to provide all of the essential building blocks.

The Empire is doing things the hard way; using an asteroid to build a Death Star would require much less work, as metals and organic compounds would already be there.

A Nasa engineer, Brian Muirhead, has proposed a method to efficiently build a Death Star, and it's not the way the Empire would have done it. Instead of constructing the massive weapon from scratch by launching materials from a planet, an asteroid could be used to provide all of the essential building blocks

Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains in a Wired video that a Death Star can't just be built by 'launching a bunch of stuff off of a planet.'

He suggests that it would be much easier to use materials that are already there.

An asteroid contains metals, organic compounds, and water, all of which would be necessary for Death Star production.

With these materials already there, a person would have, 'all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star,' he explains in the video.

Muirhead won't be building his own Death Star anytime soon, but the engineer will be helping Nasa to get up close and personal with asteroids, while working on the Asteroid Redirect Mission.

This mission will land a robot on an asteroid, and collect a boulder from the surface. The boulder will be placed into orbit around the moon, and later recollected by a crewed mission, who will take samples.

Muirhead says he expects the landing to happen around 2023.

In Star Wars, sub-light starships are able to zip through asteroid fields, manoeuvring quickly to avoid getting struck.

The Empire is doing things the hard way; using an asteroid to build a Death Star would require much less work, as metals and organic compounds would already be there. Muirhead won't be building his own Death Star anytime soon, but the engineer will be helping Nasa to get up close and personal with asteroids, while working on the Asteroid Redirect Mission

Nasa hasn't yet reached these capabilities, but Muirhead explains that a slower-moving scenario is possible. They key, he says, is ion propulsion.

The starships in the movies can sense moving objects ahead of them and react quickly, he says in the video, turning away from danger by use of powerful ion thrusters.

On the Asteroid Redirect Mission, Nasa has four ion engines, capable of 'low thrust,' which could take a craft through the spaces between the main belt asteroids.

To go further than that would require an advanced power system. In order to manoeuvres through the Galaxy, Star Wars taps into fission and fusion.