He gradually remembers that he was sent to the Tau Ceti system, 12 light-years from Earth, to find a means of reversing a solar dimming event that could cause the extinction of humanity.
[3] A film adaptation is currently in production, starring Ryan Gosling and Sandra Hüller, with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directing.
The world's governments cooperate, giving former European Space Agency (ESA) administrator Eva Stratt unilateral authority and legal immunity to solve the problem.
An Astrophage-fueled starship, the Hail Mary, is developed to travel to Tau Ceti to obtain knowledge of Astrophage resistance and return the findings to Earth with unmanned mini-ships ("beetles", with each named after their respective Beatle counterpart).
Stratt orders the release of methane from Antarctica to reduce global cooling, but the threat of famine and wars over food on Earth remains for the 26 years that the Hail Mary mission is expected to take.
Rocky, a skilled engineer, has been in the Tau Ceti system for 46 years as the last survivor of his crew; Grace deduces that the others died from space radiation, an unknown concept to Eridians.
En route, Grace discovers that he has accidentally bred into the Taumoeba the ability to permeate and escape their containers, to avoid the toxic nitrogen that he is breeding them to resist.
Although Grace fixes the problem on Hail Mary, he realizes that the Blip-A is made almost entirely of the same material as those containers (xenonite, a xenon compound with extraordinary tensile strength and heat resistance), and that the Taumoeba would have consumed its fuel, leaving Rocky stranded.
Grace chooses the latter, sending the beetles back to Earth with miniature farms of Taumoeba and instructions to save the sun, while he locates the fuel-less Blip-A and reunites with Rocky three months after their departure.
Knowing that humanity has survived on Earth, Grace considers returning to Earth, with the Hail Mary still operational and in orbit around Erid, but has to ponder the trip since he has friends on Erid (especially Rocky) and he finds his new teaching career rewarding, as well as experiencing some mild health problems due to aging and being in hypergravity for an extended time period.
In a profile in The New York Times, Weir says that after completing The Martian, he began a multi-volume space opera called Zhek, about a substance that could absorb electromagnetic radiation and be used as a fuel for interstellar travel.
Several elements from Zhek were brought over to Project Hail Mary, including a ruthless bureaucrat character, and an energy-absorbing substance used as starship fuel.
[7][8][9] Writing for The New York Times, sci-fi author Alec Nevala-Lee wrote "For readers who can forgive its shortcomings, the result is an engaging space odyssey.
"[13] The reviewer for The Boston Globe wrote that "Project Hail Mary is still a suspenseful space yarn that zigs and zags — sometimes literally — in ingenious directions.
"[14] Project Hail Mary debuted at number three on The New York Times Best Seller list for Combined Print & E-Book Fiction in May 2021.
[16] Project Hail Mary additionally achieved the #1 spot on the New York Times Audio Fiction Best Seller List for three weeks in February 2022.
[39] At the time of the announcement, the list of people who is associated with this film as producers included Amy Pascal, Gosling, Lord, Miller, Aditya Sood, Rachel O’Connor and Weir.