Running With No Destination

So in order to derive a specific date to start from, I'll be breaking my own rules to steal a date from movie canon. Namely, the watch in the post-explosion scene puts the date that Grace is originally detained at February 14th, 2023. Valentine's Day: cute! Not so great for the happy couple, rip Drs. Dubois and Shapiro. Real ones. Grace is then held in a cell for three days and the launch of the Hail Mary occurs on February 19th, 2023 (though the crew is ferried up two days earlier, February 17th). This is derived from the book - Dimitri lays out the timeline during the tertiary scientist conversation.

"The Hail Mary will leave on schedule" said Stratt. "Five days from now. The crew will have two days of preflight checks, so that means the Soyuz has to launch in three days."

- Chapter 23, Project Hail Mary

Okay, so as previously established in Part 1, we know that the Antarctica Nuking occurred within a year of this launch. Now, for the sake of easier travel, let's presume they went when the ice was at minimum, thus establishing the Nuking of Antarctica in Late February to Early March 2022.

Overall, the timeline of the Petrova Taskforce is intentionally vague. We are working with bread crumbs, but thankfully, those breadcrumbs have numbers. So let's turn to everyone's favorite negligent gambler, Dr. Robert Redell. One of the early primary constraints on the Mary's launch is fuel, and Redell provides a solution in Chapter 14 with his blackpanels - he notes that the fuel will be enough for the Hail Mary in a few years, and that the ship won't be done by then anyway. If you do the math based on that 2000 kg/day figure, btw, it works out to 1000 days for the 2mil kg of fuel for the Hail Mary. Roughly. There are a couple of other factors we would throw in - construction time, scaling of astrophage, restructuring of entire industries to support this kind of mass construction etc. For the sake of mitigation of incoming headaches, let's say that 1200 days is our number from Redell's meeting (October 8th, 2019) to Launch, and that any difference may be assigned to the fact that Stratt definitely never had all her eggs in one basket on the energy front, and likely was still utilizing nuclear energy to produce astrophage in excess of the Sahara farm.

“We know that,” I said. “I’ve been using a nuclear reactor’s heat to breed up Astrophage for the last several months.”

“What’d you get? Maybe a few grams? My idea can get you a thousand kilograms per day. In a few years you’ll have enough for the whole Hail Mary mission. It’ll take you longer than that to build the ship anyway.”

- Chapter 13, Project Hail Mary

So now we turn to Venus to figure out our ArcLight intercept in 2019. Now, time to admit that I'm not a trained astrophysicist, and so when I chose a launch, I'm just choosing based on two factors - the least amount of distance between the two planets, and the lack of obstructing planetary bodies (the Sun & Mercury). There are two periods in 2019 where the odds aren't entirely against us, and it's at the very beginning and end of the year. Now, these still aren't great in terms of proximity, it would've been better in November/December 2018, but considering the text specifically references that this wasn't a great time to go to Venus, I think we're on the right track. Let's place that intercept at roughly January/February 2019, which puts a launch at late 2018, and has the probe coming down roughly mid 2019.

“Tell us about going to Venus,” the reporter said. “What makes it so hard?”

“The main problem is fuel,” said Browne. “There are specific transfer windows when interplanetary travel takes the minimum amount of fuel, but we were nowhere near an Earth-Venus window. So we had to put a lot more fuel in orbit just to get ArcLight there in the first place.”

“So it’s a case of bad timing, then?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t think there’s ever a good time for the sun to get dimmer.”

- Chapter 2, Project Hail Mary

Now, take a year off of that per Grace's inner monologue about the ArcLight, and here we are in 2018. This is where everyone first hears about the Petrova Problem, and Grace has his conversation with Marissa. Now we have a general scale for those luminosity figures she gave us: loss of 0.01% in 2018, 1% in 2027, and 5% by 2038. Yay! Let's check back in with those numbers later on, but for now, we're assuming the events of Project Hail Mary (Earth-side!) take place over roughly five years. I know that seems super compressed and accelerated, but in canon Grace spends a lot of time talking about how fast everything is moving - Stratt is utilizing her power to the fullest extent to command resources across the globe, and entirely ignoring bureaucratic red tape. It's breathtaking.

Project Hail Mary Timeline

2065 - Eridani 40 sees that Sol is restored

2049 - Astrophage is cured

2048 - Beetles Arrive at Earth

2036 - Arrival of Hail Mary in Tau Ceti

February 19th, 2023 - Hail Mary Launch

February 17th, 2023 - Soyuz to Hail Mary

March 31st, 2022 - 1st Nuking of Antarctica

October 8th, 2019 - Redell's Meeting / Paving of the Sahara

June/July 23rd, 2019 - ArcLight Return / Lab!

January/February 2019 - ArcLight Intercept

September/October 2018 - ArcLight Launch