Project Hail Mary

The sole survivor aboard the Blip-A, Rocky becomes Grace’s scientific partner in solving the Petrova problem and eventually becomes Grace’s best friend. Rocky, an Eridian extraterrestrial, resembles a Labrador-sized spider with stone-like skin and five legs, each ending in a three-fingered hand. Rocky is a genius engineer and devoted friend who is traumatized by the deaths of the other 22 crew members aboard the Blip-A and who greatly misses his partner back on Erid.

Rocky is by turns amused and exasperated by Grace’s human memory and personal recklessness but shares Grace’s love of discovery and learning, inventive hypothesizing, and fascination with science. As Rocky’s relationship with Grace develops, Rocky also comes to share Grace’s sarcastic sense of humor and doesn’t hesitate to risk his own life to save Grace’s or to benefit all Eridians. Throughout the novel, Rocky’s tireless optimism and confidence in his abilities help to sustain Grace through his darkest moments.

Formerly with the European Space Agency, Stratt is the ruthless leader of Project Hail Mary. She is decisive and authoritarian, unmoved by humor or sensitivity, but her bravado is motivated by her fervent mission to save humanity from as much suffering as possible. She and Grace have a generally antagonistic relationship, sharing the same goals but often disagreeing on how to accomplish them. Still, Grace respects Stratt’s competence, and Stratt believes Grace is fundamentally a good person.

Stratt’s wielding of power can verge on the superfluous, such as when she refuses to comply with a prison search on principle, but underlying this display is her fear to show any weakness, knowing the fate of humanity rests on her shoulders. She is unbothered by being disliked by most of the Hail Mary Taskforce, staying single-minded in working towards her goals and undeterred by moral dilemmas, using rational assessment of risk, rather than ethics, to make decisions. Weir uses Stratt as a foil to Grace, contrasting her compulsion to minimize risk and her willingness to do and sacrifice anything for humanity with Grace’s reluctance to sacrifice himself, guilty conscience, and wild experimentation. It is the combination of their approaches that leads to the success of Project Hail Mary.

The stern, disciplined commander of the Hail Mary, Yáo is a Chinese astronaut who is driven by a deep sense of honor. He assumes responsibility for all the crew, promising to ensure fast, painless deaths for the crew when the mission is complete, thus shouldering an immense psychological burden. When Grace first refuses to board the Hail Mary, Yáo tells Stratt that he will not accept any crew members without their full consent; Stratt thus must lie to Yáo and give Grace the amnesia drug to cover up her actions. Grace greatly admires Yáo’s strength of character.

The Hail Mary’s Russian engineer, Ilyukhina is rowdy and funny but highly competent. Although Weir uses Ilyukhina to provide comic relief, she is also shown to be thoughtful and caring and to take her duty seriously. When DuBois and Shapiro are killed, she is particularly upset that they were investigating a problem that should have been under her purview.

Weir uses other scientists of Project Hail Mary to emphasize themes of international cooperation, highlight scientific specialties that enrich the reader’s understanding of the novel’s premise, and explore the scale of collaboration that would be needed to facilitate a mission of this scope and scale.

Each scientist is given a unique relationship to the intersection of science and morality: Dr. Lokken works to mitigate risk while understanding the mission will never be perfectly safe, while Dmitri Komorov is entirely unconcerned by the dangerous amounts of energy he is manipulating, which put the whole aircraft crew at risk. Lamai seeks to reduce human suffering, while Redell is entirely motivated by profit. Dr. Leclerc is devastated by what he sees as the total subversion of his values, and Steve Hatch is preposterously optimistic. Grace considers himself just one of many scientists working on Project Hail Mary but discovers that all the other scientists consider him to be Stratt’s second-in-command.