You can view the full infographic below, and you can also see the trailer for the upcoming Rogue One movie here.
So what can we conclude from all of this? The final figure given only covers the outer shell of the space station, so you’d still need to consider all of the other costs such as the labour and staffing, weaponry, tractor beams and comms equipment. Furthermore, the entire outer hull of the Death Star was coated in steel quadanium. The vast majority of that iron is found in the Earth’s core, so you might find excavating it a little tricky. In fact, the Earth has enough iron to build as many as 2 billion Death Stars! There’s just one problem with that though. As an alternative, you could look at using iron, which the Earth has in abundance. That means that at today’s rate of production (1.3 billion tonnes a year) it would take 833,315 years to get together the steel needed for the build, at a cost of $852,000,000,000,000,000. Firstly, Star Wars fans seem to generally agree that the Death Star was made from steel, and the infographic suggests that with a diameter of 140km, a whopping 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes would be needed. So yeah, if you’re thinking of blowing up Alderaan any time soon, you’d better get saving!Īlthough considering it’s estimated that there’s only $80.9 trillion in the world anyway, you might be better off not bothering! So why exactly would it cost so much? Let’s take a little bit of a closer look at the data. This got the folks at Twizzle party planners wondering just how much did it actually cost the Empire to build their behemoth of a space station? Well, the short answer is a LOT! They estimated that the total cost construction cost would be an eye-watering $22,452,000,000,000,000,000 (That’s just over $22 quintillion in case you were wondering!). (Plans which of course turn out to be crucial to the plot of the original 1977 movie!) The story will take place shortly before Episode IV and explore how a group of Rebel spies got their hands on the Empire’s plans for their infamous galactic superweapon, the Death Star. The film is set to star Felicity Jones, who you might remember from the Stephen Hawking biopic ‘The Theory of Everything’ and is being directed by Gareth Edwards who recently helmed the Godzilla reboot. I'm just going to shake my fist angrily at the script.It may feel like Episode VII only came out yesterday, but the Star Wars hype machine is about to kick into gear once again as we get ready for the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on December 16 th. As for how they built the substantially larger Second Death Star in just 4 short years after the Battle of Yavin, while I could rationalize something about the Emperor taking the destruction of the original as a personal affront and flooding colossal amounts of money and resources into the thing while simply expanding upon already proven technology. I mean, between the need to slowly gather resources without arousing suspicion, engineering setbacks, and some sabotage by the labor force (for that matter who thought using slaves was a good idea on a prototype?), it's plausible that actual construction could have been quicker once the proper knowledge base was in place. The biggest issue I can forsee is the sheer logistical nightmare of keeping something like that a secret while excavating and appropriating the colossal resources necessary to create the required mass. So when you've got a hearty slice of GDP coming into the coffers at Coruscant, and the best engineers at Sienar, Kaut, and Corellia on retainer, it's not entirely unreasonable for a super-project of the Death Star's magnitude to be accomplished in 20 years. In a galactic society with a dominant central government in the form of the Republic/ Empire, advanced manufacturing, rigorous intergalactic economic trade, and heavy automation, the economic output of planets is likely much greater. The current global economy produces nominally 77 Trillion dollars a year. The Death Star took about 19-20 years to construct, and an unknown number of years to design.