The Death Star's Operational Costs Were Out of This World

That's no moon—it's a wildly expensive, economy-sinking boondoggle of a battle station. British company Ovo Energy wanted to figure out how much it would cost per day to operate the Death Star, so it got a math professor at Dartmouth and an editor of Physics Central to look into it, Mental Floss reports. According to Ovo Energy, which has a nifty infographic explaining the methodology, its team got information on the Empire's super weapon, including number of employees, number of levels and sub-levels, and the physics of hyperspace jumps, from StarDestroyer.net and Wookieepedia.

Factoring in feeding and housing more than 2 million employees ("They're probably losing a couple hundred staffers daily to those deadly trash compactors," CNET quips), jumping to hyperspace, nearly 2 billion light bulbs to light 342 levels and sub-levels, recharging and using a planet-destroying laser (requiring an energy output "3 million times more powerful than the sun"), trash disposal, laundry, and more, Ovo figures it would cost $7.7 octillion per day to operate the Death Star. That's 30 trillion times all the money on Earth and a "cost so high that the numbers sound as fake as Jar-Jar's accent." Cinema Blend points out that even if the Rebels hadn't blown up the Death Star, "economic stress" may have done the job for them before long. (More Death Star stories.)