in the Rocket City
Holograms
Holograms have been around for decades, but only in
framed formats that only look like they go on forever.
The trick is to project a holographic image into thin air.
An English company called Musion Systems built what
it calls a 3D holographic projector, but it projects its
image onto highly reflective foil. It works only against a
dark background.
Scientists at Southern Cal have developed a system
that looks a lot like Leia’s only hope, here. But it only
looks like thin air. In fact, the image is projected onto
a mirror spinning so rapidly that your eye can’t follow it.
inside the science of episode
I
II
Not only are twin stars possible, they’re actually common, says Jeanne Cavelos in “The Science of Star
Wars.” The star closest to our sun — Proxima Centauri,
for example — is part of a trinary star system.
Twin stars would have to be fairly close together for a
nearby planet to be habitable. A planet needs a stable
gravitational pull as well as consistent light and radiation levels, Cavelos says, in order to support even the
kind of arid life we see on Tatooine.
Graphics, research by Charles Apple/Special to The Times
Interviews, research by Lee Roop/The Huntsville Times
Sources: “The Science of Star Wars” by Jeanne Cavelos; “Star Wars:
Where Science Meets Imagination” by National Geographic and the
Boston Museum of Science; “Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary” by David West Reynolds and James Luceno; StarWars.com; Internet Movie Data Base; www.the-numbers.com; Lucasfilm Ltd.; Musion
Systems Ltd.; USC Institute for Creative Technology
Images: Courtesy of Lucasfilm
VI
AERODYNAMICS
Clearly, spacecraft like X-Wings and TIE
fighters don’t exist yet and probably never
will. Yet, at least one expert doesn’t mind
talking smack about them.
“If I wanted to win a space battle in the
Star Wars universe,” says Dr. Les Johnson,
deputy manager of the Advanced Concepts
Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center,
“I’d have the real physics working for me,
and I could outmaneuver all of them.”
Like Darth Vader says, the Force is
strong with this one...
For now, it looks like Leia may have to wait a little longer. Perhaps she could send Obi-Wan a text message.
Binary suns
III IV V
Fit to be TIE’d
“It seemed like the little TIE fighters had to
fire from the front all the time, and I thought,
‘That’s silly,’” says Johnson. “You’re disadvantaging yourself.
Hatch
Cockpit
“If I wanted to attack somebody who was to
my left and I was flying in one direction, what
you do is have an inner part of your spacecraft that is able to rotate separate from your
direction of motion, and you just turn around
and shoot at them,” says Johnson. “You don’t
have to do this banking turn. “
Laser
blasters
Why do
X-Wings
have wings?
(Or lack thereof)
“But when you’re in space, you just fire a thruster to
go in the direction you want to go and you start to
get a force in that direction,” says Johnson. “Almost
immediately, you’re going to start moving in the
direction you want to go. It’ll be more of an arc, but it
won’t be a banking turn.”
Nineteen years after the formation of the Empire,
Luke Skywalker is thrust into the struggle of the
Rebel Alliance when he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, who
has lived for years in seclusion on the desert planet of
Tatooine. Obi-Wan begins Luke’s Jedi training as Luke
joins him on a daring mission to rescue the beautiful
Rebel leader Princess Leia from the clutches of the
evil Empire. Although Obi-Wan sacrifices himself in a
lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, his former
apprentice, Luke, proves that the Force is with him
by destroying the Empire’s dreaded Death Star.
Released: May 25, 1977
Radiators
(insides
of panels)
First weekend gross: $1.6 million
Solar array
(outsides
of panels)
Laser
cannons
“In water and air, the reason [vehicles] rely on those
banking turns is they rely on lift and they have to use
rudders and push against the air to turn,” says Dr.
Johnson.
A New Hope
Directed by: George Lucas
Cockpit
“The aircraft in Star
Wars have wings,
which would be
useless in space
since wings are used
to push against air,”
says Paul A. Dove, computer
engineer in the Flight Computers
branch of the Avionics lab at NASA
Marshall Space Flight Center.
EPISODE IV:
Astromech
droid
Total domestic gross: $461.0 million
Going ‘boom’
“When an explosion happens, it wouldn’t look
like a fireball on Earth because everything’s in
motion,” says Johnson. “So when it explodes,
the explosion would keep moving. There’s
nothing to slow it down.
“So, if your spaceship explodes in space, traveling at however-many thousands of miles
per hour, it’s not going to suddenly stop and
explode. Every bit of the debris has the velocity it had when it exploded. And, truly, that
would be cooler.”
In addition, there would be no sound,
says Cooke.
Proton
torpedo port
Calling Sir Isaac Newton
“There won’t be any hair speed turns at close
to the speed of light,” says Dr. William Cooke
of the Meteoroid Environments Office at
Marshall Space Flight Center. “The pilot and
anyone else inside would be splattered up
against their seats.”
Wings can unfold
for battle
“Sounds like explosions in space
have always amused me. But
seeing a flash
would be boring
without the appropriate ‘kaboom,’ so you’ve
got to cut the
entertainment
industry some
slack.”
Total worldwide gross: $797.9 million
Academy Awards: Nominated in 10 categories.
Won six awards, including for film editing, original
score, visual effects and sound mixing, plus a special achievement award for alien and robot voices.
The good: Nearly everything about it. This movie
was refreshing and stunning in 1977 and it’s still
great fun today.
The bad and the ugly: Some of the changes Lucas
made to the remastered edition are pretty decent.
But having poor Greedo fire first in the cantina
scene? That’s out-and-out revisionism, pal.
“A bad feeling about this”: 1) Luke, as the Millennium Falcon approaches the “small moon.” 2) Han,
in the trash compactor.
Limbs chopped off: 1) C-P3O’s arm breaks off
during an attack by Sandpeople. 2) Obi-Wan cuts
an arm off a bar patron who is threatening Luke.
Great quote:
“Who’s the more foolish:
the fool or the fool who
follows him?”
- Obi-Wan Kenobi