We’ve already talked about how the sheer size of the Death Star created enough gravity to pull trash back toward it.
Now let’s bring this back to the Death Star. And those discs are supposed to be stored onboard until they can be later disposed of properly while in harbor. Organics like banana peels are allowed to by chucked over the side, while other waste like plastics is pulped, shredded, or chunked before being compressed into a big pancake-shaped wagon wheel that is called a trash disk. So the short story is that a ship like an aircraft carrier sorts their trash. The Navy is expected to adhere to MARPOL 73/78, which are the International protocols and maritime laws used to prevent pollution by seafaring vessels. I mentioned previously that we can imagine the Death Star as a Naval ship, so let’s take a detour to lean into that a little more. But let’s play along and see where this goes. So if simply shoving something out an airlock would result in it falling back towards the Death Star, then what do you do with your trash? Well, we’ve seen the trash compactor scene in A New Hope, so…SPOILERS, I guess. But still enough that if you chucked your McDonald’s trash out the side of the Death Star into the vacuum of space, your Mickey-D’s wrappers would fall back and land somewhere else on the death star, even if you gave it a good heave-ho.Įven if you fired the trash out of a t-shirt cannon probably. That type of mass would create a bit of surface gravity.
The Death Star is as big as a moon and let’s just assume it is roughly as dense as a Naval ship, because that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption but, more importantly, I need you to do that to make my stupid article work.