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The fictional weapon from the movie Star Wars is so huge and destructive that it has caught fancy of humans on earth for quite sometime. There have been all kinds of discussions, starting from its cost calculation to the economic impact its destruction can cause. According to Brian Muirhead, Chief Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Wired  that he recommends using the materials already in space, such as asteroids, to build a death star more economically. He says that to launch stuff from the Earth can be extremely expensive.

At Popular Science, the math suggests that by using the asteroids for building death star can reduce the cost by $29.5 quintillion. Rather than launching stuff into the orbit, it will be much more economical to mine the asteroids for gathering the materials required for building the death star or anything that else that doesn't blow up a star.

A petition was filed in 2012 to the Whitehouse.gov in 2012 that received more than 35,000 signatures asking the White House to invest in a Death Star by 2016. However, the official response of the petition was appropriate, titled, "This isn't the Petition you're looking for". Before they turned down the request, the White House gave reasons such as, the construction cost of Death Star is estimated to be more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. They said that the country wants to reduce the deficit, not increase it. They also said that they are not in favor of blowing planets up. They also posed a question that why would they spend taxpayer money on building a Death Star with the most significant flaw that it can be misused by one-man starship? Death star or no death star, there has been a growing interest of scientists in mining asteroids for several other purposes, reports The Christian Monitor.