Project Hail Mary

Kiltonge said:
Having just watched the film, I would have relaxed into it more if there was some indication why they only launched one ship - ignoring the need for dramatic effect.

Yes, PHM cost $11 trillion or whatever, but once the R&D costs are sunk then building hardware is the cheap bit. Maybe fuel was the issue?

If it's your one big chance to save everything, staking it all on one ship that could get whacked by an asteroid before it even gets out of the system seems foolish.

A single throwaway line about "We've built three but to be honest just one getting there will be a miracle" would have helped, and would have made Grace look like even more of a fluke.

Nice Easter egg right at the end of the credits, though; made me laugh!
Click to expand...
I thought the first ship blew up on the launch pad?
 
No, that was the facility behind them.

The rocket you saw in the foreground was a generic looking thing, perhaps used to ferry some last cargo to LEO so as to dock with the nearly complete ship.

No escape tower that I recall.

I am thinking they didn't trust the sun-eater drive for anything other than space use

Now, maybe they felt they didn't need an escape tower with the new drive--but that rocket fairing may have had a small capsule in it--good for a short jaunt....like here:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2041918344736207255

www.space.com

How the 'Project Hail Mary' book walks the line between hard and speculative science fiction… and why the film did not

Two different ways to tell the same story.
www.space.com www.space.com
 
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My basically only issue with the movie - why "Hail Mary" was not equipped with any kind of planetary probe. Mission planners knew, that astrophages breed only in planetary atmospheres; so for whatever reasom Tau Ceti wasn't affected, it could be linked with the planet. It was reasonable to equip the vessel with some kind of probes, capable of taking samples from planets. Considering the efficiency of spin drives, suxh probe could be made extremely lightweight and compact.
 

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