I’m sure the Empire and Darth Vader were pretty disappointed to see their precious Death Star blown to pieces, but one has to wonder how many galactic credits were blown on the building of this planet-destroying mega weapon.
Well, some Economics students at Lehigh University have done just that. They estimated the cost of the steel alone to be $852,000,000,000,000,000 (yes that’s quadrillion) and that it would take over 833,315 years to produce enough steel to get the project started.
While there aren’t many details on how they came up with this estimate, my favorite part of the post was reading through some of the 250+ comments. When discussions center around such an iconic movie, you’re bound to bring out fans from all walks of life, along with those who are willing to offer alternative suggestions (and corrections) regarding the cost of the Death Star. One commenter’s advice was:
A better method of estimating cost is to use a similar structure then scaling it to the new project. The closest structure to the Death Star is not an Invincible-class light aircraft carrier, rather a Nimitz-class supercarrier.
Thus, with rounding to make the calculations simpler:
Death Star: 1.0e15 tonnes
Nimitz Carrier: 1.0e5 tonnes1 Death Star = 1.0e10
Nimitz Carriers Nimitz Carrier Cost = $4.5e9 ($4.5 Billion) or $45,000 per tonne
Death Star Cost = $4.5e9 * 1.0e10 = $4.5e19 = $45,000,000,000,000,000,000
Original Estimate: $852,000,000,000,000,000, about 50 times less than scaling a Nimitz Carrier.
This estimate is for the Death Star only and excludes support fighters and crew costs.
I thought this was a fun article and the students from Lehigh University have other posts like the Economics of the Bat Mobile and the Economics of Friends.
Is it worth building something that can so easily be destroyed (twice)? I’d have to go with ‘No’ because who or what would we use it on? We’ve already done away with Pluto. We can stand to lose another planet.
So what do you think? Yea or nay?
Wow, perhaps these students could have put their time to better use by calculating the cost to produce a Dyson Sphere. They would have achieved just as much, and at the same time, just as useless.
Interesting, well-researched story that completely fails. The research is based around the idea that the construction costs can be compared to modern military shipbuilding, which really fails to consider even the most elemental aspects of the fictional universe in which the Death Star exists.
First of all, keep in mind that you can (and MUST) assume that when they demonstrate certain technology in the Star Wars movies, what they’re showing isn’t the be-all and end-all of that technology. One use of technology almost always implies several others. In the Star Wars universe, the single most important technology that we have to consider is robotics.
The materials for building something like the Death Star would not be obtained the same way we gather the steel for making a new aircraft carrier. The materials for a new Death Star would certainly be obtained mainly through the mining of small moons or asteroid belts.
And that mining would largely be automated and done by droids. Remember droids? There are about six of them, on average, in any given frame of a Star Wars movie. A couple of droids that are programmed to do some material gathering and use some portion of the materials to make more droids will quickly give you a small army that will churn out enough metal to build anything you want.
Since you really only need to start with a couple of droids… just enough to get the ball rolling, your startup costs for mining a lot of materials do not need to be very high.
And as regards the actual construction of the Death Star, the same is true… most of it would (or could) be done by droids… maybe even the same army of droids that were used to do the mining. At the very least, you could disassemble that army and use the materials to create whatever different kind of droid you needed for construction. In fact, it’s really hard to imagine the need for human engineers for anything, given the sophistication of the droids demonstrated in the movies. (C-Threepio’s goofiness notwithstanding.)
It would be fascinating to see how much steel it would take to build all the droids in the star wars universe. 🙂