How Star Wars inspired design
Classic space saga shapes entrepreneurs’ thinking
Forty years ago, Star Wars first burst on to cinema screens, and from that time the world changed for the better. Star Wars introduced the world to Jedi knights with lightsabers, an evil empire building a moon size planet killer weapon, a rebel alliance with X-wing fighters and countless cool droids that were often smarter than their owners.
Quite why Star Wars was such a massive hit has been debated ever since.
But what made Star Wars different to the already loved Star Trek TV series was that Star Wars was not a prediction of our human future. Instead it was a story set in another galaxy in the ancient past.
Some of us had our lives and careers shaped by Star Wars, and by longing to create the things we saw.
Forty years on, who and what has been shaped by this revolutionary movie?
Space technology
The first Star Wars film was revolutionary in its depiction of high-speed spaceship battles.
The dog fights around the Death Star seemed so realistic.
When I took spacecraft design courses at university in the late 1980s, I did not dream a fellow Star Wars fan might one day be influential enough to design real spacecraft.
The billionaire inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk is one of those fans.
He says Star Wars was the first movie he saw, and from that he has had an obsession with space travel and for turning humans from a single planet species into a multi-planet civilisation.
In 2002, Musk created the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, with the stated aim of creating spacecraft to regularly fly hundreds of humans to and from Mars.
Musk named his series of rockets “Falcon”, after Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon. In 2017, a Falcon rocket became the first orbital class booster to return from space, land and later re-fly back into space.
In 2000, billionaire inventor Jeff Bezos started his rocket and spaceship company Blue Origin off the back of his success creating Amazon. His New Shepard rocket was the first suborbital booster to return from space, land and later re-fly back into space.
Bezos is more of a Trekkie. He is so obsessed with Star Trek that he has even acted in it, appearing as an alien in the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond.
At this point, the Star Wars mega-fan (Musk) is ahead of the Trekkie (Bezos) in delivering commercial space flight with reused rockets. But only time will tell who will win.
Speeders
Star Wars introduced us to the Landspeeder.
Luke Skywalker’s X-34 landspeeder is like a hovercraft that did exist long before Star Wars.
The Return of the Jedi showed us speeder bikes, and since then engineers have tried to replicate these amazing vehicles.
Some great engineering efforts include the Jetovator speeder bike that works over water and connects to a jet ski. The makers were clearly inspired by Star Wars.
Others have recently created and tested hoverbikes that if they were fully commercialised would be very close to the speederbikes of Star Wars.
One group has even made a speeder, the Aero-X, to test in the desert to ensure that Luke would be able to use it if need be.
Droids
But for me, it was the droids of Star Wars that had the greatest impact. There can be no greater pair of onscreen robots as R2-D2 and C-3PO.
The vision that George Lucas and his team had in creating these robots (and the others that are found in the original 1977 movie) has had a major impact on robotics development, inspiring many current day roboticists.
We are beginning to see real high quality automatic translation services — something C-3PO was designed to do. We have medical robots, military robots and even farm robots.
All of these were shown in Star Wars. Our present-day robots are not as capable as the Star Wars robots, but us roboticists are working hard to make that happen.
New fans
It is unlikely that any film in the future will be as surprising as Star Wars was. It was new and exciting and surely that is one of the reasons for its success. But yet there are new Star Wars fans being born every day. It helps that many of their parents and grandparents are also fans, and that at the moment there is a new Star Wars film out every year. If the love of Star Wars is handed down the generations then who knows what it will have inspired in another 40 years.