Star Wars: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Star Destroyers
3. The Destroyer Designer Worked For NASA
Back to the real world and another story of the early days behind the scenes of Star Wars.
When George Lucas was creating the saga’s vast landscape of planets, weapons and spaceships, he turned to experts in those fields to give the Star Wars movies roots within real science. One of those such experts was a man called Colin Cantwell, who had a vast knowledge of how space vehicles were designed and operated thanks to his time working for NASA.
Cantwell worked for NASA during the 1960s and was even responsible for helping Walter Cronkite narrate the moon landing during the historic Apollo 11 mission. Having previously served as a conceptual artist for sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colin was hired to be the visual designer for Star Wars and create some of the most iconic vessels in movie history such as the Star Destroyer, Sandcrawler, Land Speeder, Y-Wing, and X-Wing ships.
In very early drafts of the script for what became A New Hope, Colin Cantwell had worked on two separate Empire designs – Stardestroyers (then spelled as one word) and Imperial Cruisers – but the final product became a hybrid of the two, and the now iconic Star Destroyer.