in the Rocket city inside the science of episode I II III IV VIV

AERODYNAMICS (Or lack thereof)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...

ePiSoDe iV:

A New Hope

Directed by: George Lucas

Released: May 25, 1977

First weekend gross: $1.6 million

Total domestic gross: $461.0 million

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 spe-cial 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 Millen-nium 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.

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.

Great quote:

“Who’s the more foolish: the fool or the fool who follows him?”

- Obi-Wan Kenobi

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 Diction-ary” by David West Reynolds and James Luceno; StarWars.com; Inter-net Movie Data Base; www.the-numbers.com; Lucasfilm Ltd.; Musion Systems Ltd.; USC Institute for Creative Technology

images: Courtesy of Lucasfilm

Graphics, research by Charles Apple/Special to The Times Interviews, research by Lee Roop/The Huntsville Times

Holograms

Binary suns

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.

For now, it looks like Leia may have to wait a little lon-ger. Perhaps she could send Obi-Wan a text message.

Not only are twin stars possible, they’re actually com-mon, 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 radia-tion levels, Cavelos says, in order to support even the kind of arid life we see on Tatooine.

“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 disad-vantaging yourself.

“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 space-craft 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. “

“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.

“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.

“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.”

Why do X-Wings have wings?

“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.”

Calling Sir Isaac Newton

“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, trav-eling at however-many thousands of miles per hour, it’s not going to suddenly stop and explode. every bit of the debris has the veloc-ity it had when it exploded. And, truly, that

would be cooler.”

in addition, there would be no sound, says cooke.

“Sounds like explosions in space have always amused me. But

seeing a flash would be boring without the ap-propriate ‘ka-boom,’ so you’ve got to cut the entertainment industry some slack.”

Going ‘boom’

Fit to be TIE’d

Laser cannons

Proton torpedo port

cockpit

cockpithatch

Laser blasters

Radiators (insides of panels)

Solar array (outsides of panels)

Astromech droid

Wings can unfold for battle