How Much Would It Cost To Build A Death Star?

death-star

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 16th. 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.  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. (Plans which of course turn out to be crucial to the plot of the original 1977 movie!)

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!). So yeah, if you’re thinking of blowing up Alderaan any time soon, you’d better get saving!

Although 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. 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.

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. As an alternative, you could look at using iron, which the Earth has in abundance. In fact, the Earth has enough iron to build as many as 2 billion Death Stars! There’s just one problem with that though. The vast majority of that iron is found in the Earth’s core, so you might find excavating it a little tricky.

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. (But apparently not a guard railing…)

So what can we conclude from all of this?

  1. The Empire has a LOT of disposable cash.
  2. You might be better putting that money into a savings account!

You can view the full infographic below, and you can also see the trailer for the upcoming Rogue One movie here.

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(Twizzle also produced a similar infographic before the release of Captain America: Civil War, looking at how much it would cost to be Cap, and you guessed it, it ain’t cheap!)

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One Comment

  1. I’m pretty sure the Empire doesn’t have just one world’s worth of cash or resources. The Republic had existed for 10,000 years before the Empire came along and encompassed half of the galaxy. That’s roughly 100,000 times the resources of Earth. A Galactic Civilization with hyperspace capability could probably easily handle that. So, 22.5 quintillion might be chump change.

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