Read History
2025 | Score: 8.5
Fun book.
Format: Audible
Days: 7
Date: 10/18/2025 -> 10/25/2025
Summary
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
Man wakes up from coma in a small medical looking room with amnesia. Hard for him to walk / move much, robot was taking care of him. 2 dead people in bunks nearby. Slowly explores small area, trying to figure out what is going on and remember life. Memories start coming back, he is Dr. Ryland Grace, a Jr. high science teacher who likes space. He realizes via some tests in a lab that gravity is not correct. Concludes he must not be on Earth. More memories come back. Earth’s sun Sol was dying from some mysterious light stealing it’s energy. He gets called in to investigate the sample taken because of what he wrote his doctorate thesis on. Discovers a single celled alien life form. Astrophage.
In the present, he is in a space ship. He realizes he is by the star Tau Ceti, which for some reason is unaffected by Astrophage. He needs to figure out why.
After experimenting with Astrophage on Earth he learns how to duplicate them. Very important so that more people can test them. He is now important. Dr. Stratt is the lady basically in charge of the world since she is the lead for “Project Hail Mary”. They want to send a team to Tau Ceti to investigate and send back the results via small beetle ships. It is a suicide mission. The entire world is working on this.
Suddenly Grace sees another spaceship super close to his. It seems friendly. It sends over a container with little diagrams of their ships, then after confirmation makes a tunnel to connect them.
Project Hail Mary recruits the best minds on Earth. The biggest problem is they need to put the crew into coma’s and only 1/7000 are able to not die in a coma. The ship will be powered by Astrophage, so they pave the Sahara to breed them. It takes 13 years to get to Tau ceti (+ 13 back) so Earth needs to live for that long. But it isn’t supposed to so they nuke Antartica to create more greenhouse gasses.
Grace meets and Alien rock-spider like creature through a wall. Via numbers and elements they begin to learn to communicate. The aliens speak via musical notes. Alien is dubbed Rocky. Rocky and Grace begin to exchange more and more information about themselves, their species, worlds, and science. Rocky is also here to try to save his planet from Astrophage.
Eventually they can speak fluently and Rocky (an incredible engineer with an eidetic memory) moves into the Hail Mary after creating Xenonite walls since his atmosphere is 29x, hot, and ammonia. They figure out their must be a predator of Astrophage on the nearby planet. They jerryrig a solution and both almost die and hurt the ship, but they get it. They have to do selective breeding to make it immune to nitrogen so that it can save their planets. Also because Rocky ship has extra Astrophage no longer a suicide mission for Grace.
Flashback: 9 days before launch an explosion happens and the 2 scientists who were supposed to go on this mission die. Grace has to be the one. He says no. Stratt imprisons him and says she will feed him an amnesia medicine so he don’t remember this when he wakes up. It worked.
Rocky and Grace successfully have the “Taumeba” predator they need to save Earth and Arid. They part ways. Grace realizes Taumeba also evolved to escape Xenonite, so he is fune but Rocky will be in trouble. He sends the beetles and goes to save Rocky, his friend. Together they return to Arid where a Earth-dome is constructed and Grace lives happily, teaching young Iridians science.