As we mourn the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, we turn our attention to engineering and design inspired by “a galaxy far, far away.”

Use Touch Display Screens to Control an Interstellar Battle Fleet
Here’s a creative application of touch-screen display technology. Thanks to research performed by a computer science student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, you might soon be able to role-play as the fan-favorite Star Wars character, Admiral Akbar!

Arthur Nishimoto — whose academic focus is on video game design, software engineering and multi-touch interfaces — has spent the last couple of years developing a game in which players can use touch display screens to control their own interstellar battle fleet in combat with others’. As Boing Boing notes, the game “explores how a real-time interactive strategy game that would typically rely on complex keyboard commands and mouse interactions be transferred into a multi-user, multi-touch environment.”

The game was originally designed on a 52-inch multi-touch LCD tabletop display called TacTile, but has been ported to a 20 ft.-wide LCD wall at the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Watch these kids take the Star Wars-inspired game for a spin:

Check out Wired.com for more information on the game’s development and future.

Watch NASA Test Old Spacesuits
The spacesuit used on shuttle and International Space Station missions is like a personal spacecraft, protecting the astronaut and enabling much of the work that needs to be done in space. Also like the spacecraft, it has required ingenuity in design and engineering.

“While Nicholas de Monchaux’s recent book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, is now the definitive investigation of this terrain, the short video [below] gets at something fundamental to the space enterprise, too,” according to The Atlantic. “Namely, it’s funny to design things for the heavens from down here on the ground.

“That is to say, watching a guy catch a football on a high school field wearing a spacesuit is awesome,” according to the magazine, which put together this video from a longer film in George Mason Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

Star Wars Blueprints on the Way
We started this Light Friday with Star Wars, and we’ll end it as such. This fall will bring the release of a first-of-its-kind book featuring more than 200 of the original production design blueprints created for all six films of the Star Wars series. Among the collection will be blueprints for the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, TIE fighters and even the Cantina.

“The Rebel Blockade Runner hallway, the hold of the Millennium Falcon, the Death Star, the Emperor’s throne room, Jabba the Hutt’s Palace, X-wings, TIE fighters and the Tatooine homestead — all of these places and hundreds more had to be designed, built, painted and dressed, with technical drawings showing the way,” an announcement of the blueprint collection says.

“Star Wars: The Blueprints gives voice to the groundbreaking and brilliant engineers, designers and artists that have, in film after film, created the most imaginative and iconic locales in the history of cinema,” the book’s website states. “Melding science and art, these drawings giving [sic.] birth to fantastic new worlds, ships and creatures. Most importantly, Blueprints shows how in bringing this extraordinary epic to life, the world of special effects as we know it was born.”

At $500, though, don’t expect this book to be in our next Geeky Holiday Gift Guide.

Check out io9 for a roundup of some of the blueprints.

Cheers.