Colin Cantwell, the man who designed the spaceships in the Star Wars movies, has died at the age of 90. His wife, Sierra Dall, confirmed the death last Saturday, although she did not specify the reason for it.
Star Wars fans are aware that without Cantwell's work, space recreation would not have been the same. His works include prototypes for the X-wing starfighter, the TIE fighter, and the Death Star.
But beyond Star Wars, he also participated in other films, some of them galactic, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and WarGames.
Born in San Francisco in 1932, Cantwell studied animation before making the leap to Hollywood. They were not the only studies of his, as he also attended the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.
In the 1960s he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at NASA on flight education programs. During that decade, in 1969, he was responsible for feeding Walter Cronkite's updates during the 1969 moon landing.
As if that were not enough, in his career there was also a place for letters, since he wrote two science fiction novels.
4
