Science facts catch up with movie sci-fi

"Star Wars" never did let scientific facts get in the way of a good story: Fans just accept that X-wing fighters fly through outer space as if they were jets in an atmosphere, that huge spaceships could float on antigravity drives or zoom faster than light, and that lightsabers cut through virtually everything except another lightsaber (why don't they just make the darn things longer?).

But in the 28 years since the first "Star Wars" movie came out, science and technology have gone in directions that reflect some aspects of that galaxy long ago and far away: Particularly when it comes to space weaponry, robotics and communications, there are increasing parallels between "Star Wars" science fiction and science fact.

That doesn't mean engineers looked to the movies to figure out how to design a modern-day Death Star. Rather, the visions reflected in the movies had an impact on how real-life technologies were presented. The concept for a national missile defense system, which was nicknamed "Star Wars" during the Reagan administration, serves as a prime example.

Final frontier for weaponry
Space warfare was pure fiction when the first "Star Wars" movie came out, but now Pentagon policy is considering scenarios for monitoring missile launches from orbit, shooting down missiles with interceptors, or knocking out enemy targets using ground-based, airborne or space-borne lasers. Just this week, sources in the Bush administration have been talking about taking a more aggressive stance on space weapons.

However, military planners haven't made as much progress on their version of "Star Wars" as they expected to back in the 1980s. In fact, the missile defense system's scope has been scaled back to defend merely against smaller-scale threats from the likes of North Korea, rather than the doomsday scenario of a U.S.-Soviet conflict.

"The expectations have been radically scaled back," defense policy expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told MSNBC.com. "It has achieved a degree of reality that it didn't have 20 years ago, but it has been constrained by reality in a way that it was not 20 years ago."

Slow progress on propulsion
In the field of spacecraft propulsion, researchers haven't yet gotten the faster-than-light hyperdrive to work (even Han Solo sometimes had trouble in that department).

Speed test How high can you score on “Star Wars” lore? Take MSN Games’ pop quiz.

But they have developed distant cousins of the ion drive that "Star Wars" spaceships used for sublight-speed travel. A solar-electric ion drive was used successfully on NASA's Deep Space 1 probe in the late 1990s, and yet another powered the European Space Agency's SMART-1 spacecraft into lunar orbit last year.

The only trouble is, it takes months for these real-life engines to build up a head of steam — so the fusion-powered ion drive on Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter would leave SMART-1 in the interplanetary dust.

The same drawback applies to space sails, the real-life analogs to the getaway spacecraft that the evil Count Dooku used at the end of "Episode II." Sure, they should work just fine, as the Cosmos 1 solar sail is expected to demonstrate next month. But it would take a long time for a solar sail or even a magnetic sail to reach appreciable speeds.

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