As if that's news, but as they say, "the best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray." Friday didn't go as planned and at 9:00 PM I'm not finding any stories that look like big Space news. I'm ordinarily well into the next day's post by this time.
So since we're short of space news anyway, I'm going to shift gears and get into something I thought I'd write about over the weekend. A visit to a movie theater. Our first in more years than I can think of.
On Wednesday, we took a break from the endless spring of "what needs expensive work done on it now?" to go see what comes across as a surprisingly popular movie, Project Hail Mary. It's long movie based on a complicated story by Andy Weir, who wrote the book The Martian was based on. The movie is primarily Ryan Gosling on screen, although that's an over simplification. It seems to be that rare combination of a sci-fi movie that tries to get the science right for a story that's long and involved.
Gosling plays biologist Ryland Grace who was essentially kicked out of his science career when he published something that was poorly accepted by big names in his field, and he's working as an elementary school teacher. It was the only kind of job he could get. But you don't know that fact when the movie starts. The movie opens up with Grace coming out of an induced coma, on a space ship in deep space; lost and not remembering where he is or why he's there. Everyone else on the ship is dead. The movie bounces back in time to set up the answers to that and it starts with him being told someone had discovered an unexplained stream of something going from the sun to Venus. Researchers then discovered this mysterious thing was actually slowly destroying the sun and calculated that within a short time (20 years, I think) the sun will stop working and the entire population of Earth will die off. Every one and every thing will die.
They go farther to point out that every star in our part of the galaxy is showing the same effects except one, so why is that star unaffected? The name of the movie comes from realizing their only hope is to stop this thing which is pretty quickly determined to be some exotic microbe they call astrophage (star eater). Astrophage needs to be exterminated and they've found no way to kill it. It comes down to this mission named after the desperation hail Mary pass from football. Humanity can build a one-of-a-kind ship that can go nearly lightspeed and get a crew to that star to find out why it's different, but it's a one way flight and the crew is expected to die off because they don't have enough fuel to get back home.
If they go, the world may have a chance. If they don't go there is no chance. Either way, the crew is expected to die.
I found it a very well done movie and enjoyed it a lot. Gosling is the only person in the cast I recognized and know I've seen in movies before. If you go watch trailers and other videos on YouTube, you'll see that featured side to the story is that he meets a sentient, rock-creature (alien) from another planet. After they learn to communicate coarsely, Grace calls the rock alien "Rocky" and Rocky calls him Grace. The story goes back and forth between the past and present situations to explain why some parts are setup the way they are; I found those transitions fairly easy to get used to.
A large crowd scene from one of the memories before the launch of their "Hail Mary" mission. Next to Ryan Gosling (Grace) is actress Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, one of the project leaders, and seemed to be the one that tracked down Grace for the mission.