A NASA engineer explains how you would build a Death Star in real life

One of the most impressive sights from the original "Star Wars" trilogy is the Death Star, the symbol of the Dark Side's incredible power suspending in space.

But could you create anything like that using real science?

It turns out you could, sort of, according to NASA engineer Brian Muirhead - and he and his team are doing something a bit like it.

To build the Death Star, Darth Vader and company couldn't have sent materials into space. Instead, "You went and got yourself an asteroid, and built it from that," Muirhead explains in a new video for Wired.

An asteroid contains everything you need for a theoretical Death Star: organic compounds, water, metal.

Muirhead works on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, the first-ever mission to "visit a large near-Earth asteroid, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface, and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon." The mission then plans to study pieces of the boulder. Not quite a Death Star, but cool.

He also explains that we're currently capable of flying through an asteroid field, though perhaps not as quickly as Han Solo.

 Watch the whole video here: