The Floor Space of the Death Star Similar to Surface of Earth

By Richard Bruce BA, MA, and PhC in Economics

I read on the Internet that the diameter of the first Death Star, from the first Star Wars movie that came out, A New Hope, was 140 to 160 kilometers. The second Death Star from the Return of the Jedi was estimated to be even bigger.

Taking even the the lower estimate for the first and smaller Death Star this is insanely large. It was big enough to have floor space roughly equal to the surface of the earth, including the oceans. If it had housed people with the same amount of housing space enjoyed by the people today in developed nations it could have housed trillions.

To grasp how big the interior of the first Death Star was supposed to be we need to calculate the volume. To do this we use the formula for the volume of a sphere, four thirds times pi times the radius cubed.

v = 4/3 pi r3

The minimum estimated size of the diameter for the first Death Star was once again 140 kilometers, the radius is half that 70 kilometers, or 70 thousand meters.

Plugging this into our formula we get about 1.4 quadrillion cubic meters. A quadrillion is a thousand billion, or one followed by fifteen zeros.

Floor Space and Rooms

Let us assume that the floor of each deck was three meters above the one below. This is a little less than ten feet. Most of this is space to walk around, but some is for pipes, wires, structure, between decks.

Given this there are about 479 trillion square meters of floor space. Figure about five quadrillion square feet. This is slightly less than the surface of earth, including the oceans.

According to estimates I found on the Internet there were 1.7, million personnel on the first Death Star. If we split the floor space up into rooms, ten square meters or 100 square feet each, the Death Star would have about 50 trillion rooms. So there would be about 30 million rooms per person.

If they wandered around at random from room to room at the rate of one per minute they would meet on average less than two people in an eighty year life time.

If they decided to fully populate the Death Star, turn it into a giant city in space, it could accommodate ten trillion people at five small rooms, 50 square meters, or 500 square feet per person. That is more than a thousand times the population of earth, and about five thousand times the population of Alderann, Princess Leia's home planet that the Death Star destroyed.

If we use the same somewhat arbitrary standard of 50 square meters per person, the Death Star would need a radius of about 393 meters, a diameter of about 787 meters, to accommodate the estimated 1.7 million military personal on the death star. Note that is less than a kilometer.

A sphere big enough to provide 50 square meters each for the earth's population would need a radius of a little over 6.3 kilometers, about 12.6 kilometers diameter.

Educational Potential

This nicely illustrates how fast volume expands compared to radius or diameter. Volume is a function of the cube of the radius. Perhaps educators might want to use this to teach the volume of a sphere. One text book author has already expressed some interest.

Other Star Wars Pages

This is math, I also do literature. Learn how Lucas took many of his ideas for Star Wars from the comics of Jack Kirby, in the "Source of the Force." There is quite of bit of original work on that web page that is not available elsewhere. It is has been so popular that it inspired me to write the page above on the floor space of the Death Star. It has also inspired me to write a page on the influence of Sergio Leone's movie Once Upon a Time...The Revolution on Star Wars.

Last edited Octiber 26, 2019

Index of pages on various cultural and media topics

Homepage

Here is a link to my contact information..