To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope, the original prop for the lightsaber used by Luke will be going up on the space shuttle Discovery in October for a rendevous with the International Space Station.

The lightsaber was hand-delivered yesterday to Space Center Houston officials at Oakland International Airport by Chewbacca himself.  (Shouldn’t it have been Mark Hamill?  He’s not doing anything.)  In Houston, it was greeted by a legion of stormtroopers and R2-D2.

This quote from Space.com made me laugh:

Space Center Houston, as the official visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, plans to publicly display the lightsaber through Labor Day, after which it will be prepared for its launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

I didn’t realize that lightsabers had to go through a rigorous 50-day training session before going into space.