Colin Cantwell, designer of "Star Wars" spaceships and Death Star, dies at 90

Even the longtime partner of the concept artist, who died Saturday at age 90, didn't know of his attachment to the design of "Stars Wars," as well as of other classic films like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "WarGames," until the landlord of their Boulder, Colorado, apartment forced them to empty out the basement, which had been packed with drawings, slides, models and scripts — a treasure trove of sci-fi movie lore.In 1974 George Lucas asked Cantwell — a UCLA film school graduate who had created animated graphics for "2001" — to sketch designs based on his draft screenplay of a war in a galaxy far, far away. (Luke Skywalker can be seen playing with one of Cantwell's models at his Tattooine homestead.) In fact, a problem arising while working on the mold of his Death Star prototype gave Cantwell the idea that led to the film's dramatic climax, as he explained in a 2016 Reddit posting: "I noticed the two halves had shrunk at the point where they met across the middle. He liked the idea so much that it became one of the most iconic moments in the film."But Cantwell turned down Lucas' offer to run Industrial Light & Magic after the release of the first "Star Wars." Instead, the animator who'd worked on imaging and communications for NASA's lunar and Mars missions, and served as a lead analyst for CBS News' coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, pursued varied interests, from computer engineering to writing fiction.Born in San Francisco on April 3, 1932, Colin James Cantwell was the son of a graphic artist who worked for CBS.