I must need to geek out soon because I seem to be looking up science fiction based things of late.  But, I was on TheForce.net yesterday and noted a section of the site I hadn't seen before.  It is called Star Wars Technical Commentaries and discusses everything from star ship designs and function and, my favourite, The Endor Holocaust, which answers the question: "What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world?"  Apparently, the moon becomes uninhabitable and the Ewoks should have become extinct.

The circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi lead inevitably to an environmental disaster on the Endor moon. The explosion of a small artificial moon in low orbit sends a meteoric rain onto the ewok sanctuary, on a scale unmatched since Endor formed. Through either direct atmospheric injection of small particles, or showers of ejecta from large impacts, the atmosphere will be filled with smoke and fallout causing a gargantuan nuclear-winter effect.

Unless the rebel commandoes on Endor were executing a suicide mission, the rebel fleet was evidently able to intervene to protect their immediate vicinity: probably an area comparable to Luxembourg. Debris fragments amounting to the mass of the rebel fleet might conceivably have been diverted from that particular locality (by the exertion of the fleet's tractor beams) and onto adjacent areas of the Endorian globe. However this is only a tiny fraction of the total mass incident on the moon during an event lasting mere minutes. The mass of the entire debris cloud and fireball is incomparably (inexorably) greater than the combined mass of both fleets over Endor.

A general climatological catastrophe was unavoidable. Averting the disaster would have required physical action on a scale greater than the construction of a Death Star, within minutes of the battle station's explosion.

Check it out for more!