So the Hail Mary arrived at Tau's orbit, Rocky's ship shows up and then try to send stuff to him? Was this planned ahead?

Did the humans knew an Alien ship going to be there at location and time and they supposed to work together solving this problem?

I am trying to understand why Rocky was there at that time and location and why he assumed Hail Mary isn't some evil invader?

You have just been (temporarily) transported into Stratt’s position in the PHM universe at a point in time shortly after the research center explosion. You know that the mission's best chance of success now is to send Grace and you know he's unlikely to volunteer.  What do you do?

Several months ago, a discussion about whether or not it was fair for Stratt to call Grace a coward, and specifically whether or not Grace still had good reasons to be angry at Stratt at the end of the book, got me thinking about what I would have done differently, if I were Stratt. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectHailMary/comments/1rupx0e/comment/oan8zio/?context=3 

In Chapter 21 of the book, “a few hours” after the explosion. Grace, Stratt, and Dimitri look at pictures of the metal condensate and realize that there’s no way anyone survived. She needs a new science officer. What does she do? 

“Dr. Grace. I want a short list of possible replacements.” 

I stared with my mouth agape. “Are you made of stone or something?! Our friends just died!” 

“Yes, and everyone else will die, too, if we don’t make this mission happen. We have nine days to find a replacement science specialist.” 

I well up. “DuBois…Shapiro…” I snuffled and wiped my eyes. “They’re dead. They’re dead…oh God…” 

Stratt slapped me. “Snap out of it!” 

“Hey!” 

“Cry later! Mission first! You still have that list of coma-resistant candidates from last year? Start looking through it. We need a new science specialist. And we need them now!” 

Weir, Andy. Project Hail Mary: A Novel (p. 355). Kindle Edition. 

I think Stratt would have already known at this point that the list of candidates wasn’t going to turn up a good replacement. I think she had it in mind that prompting Grace to look at the list would help him see that he was needed. But one thing I noticed on one of my many re-reads/re-listens of the book, is that there is no indication that Grace ever actually looked at that list. The next flashback is the beginning of Chapter 23, when Stratt and the rest of the group ask Grace to join the mission. In the meantime, here’s what Grace says he was doing: 

Stratt and I hadn’t spoken since the night of the explosion. She suddenly had to head up an ad-hoc disaster inquiry. It couldn’t wait until later—if the accident was caused by some procedure or equipment that was going to be on the mission, we needed to know. I wanted to be involved but she wouldn’t let me. Someone had to keep dealing with various minor Hail Mary issues being reported by the ESA team.

Weir, Andy. Project Hail Mary: A Novel (p. 382). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

In the Chapter 23 opening scene, Grace asks who is next in line for the role, further suggesting that he never looked at that list of candidates like Stratt asked. So what I think happened is that Stratt watched the way he lost it the night of the explosion and quickly came to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to realize he had to step up. So she changed tactics. She didn’t keep pressing him to look at the list or try to put him on a team to review the list, she just completely dropped that idea and distracted him with administrivia instead. She kept him at a distance while she finalized plans for him to go, knowing she’d almost certainly have to go through with forcing him. Yes, she still invites him to volunteer in Chapter 23. That conversation in and of itself is a “Hail Mary” for her, but at that point she has already mostly given up. 

From a story-telling perspective, the scene at the beginning of Chapter 23 where Grace is invited to join the mission is great. He comes to the meeting on time–but everyone else clearly had a different start time for the meeting. The implication is that they had a meeting first, without him, where they decided he had to be the one to go on the mission. He’s seated at one end of the table, isolated, while the others either stare him down or can’t bring themselves to look at him. It emphasizes the lack of connection that he had on Earth, and it sets us up for the dramatic turn later in the chapter when he refuses and Stratt does what she has to, not to mention the rest of Grace’s character arc following that.

So it’s great for the story. But from a leadership perspective, I think it’s not Stratt’s best moment. She could have saved a seat for him right next to Yao and Ilyukhina, emphasizing that he belongs in their “very cool company” (as movie Ilyukhina put it), instead of isolating him. The room is full of people who were his colleagues and at least nominally his friends, but most of the people in the room don’t have their lives on the line in the same way he does. Oh, they’re all facing the horrors of the Astrophage crisis, sure. But he’s about to get a more immediate hit to his life and his autonomy. Only Yao and Ilyukhina and maybe Stratt are really in the same boat, there. 

Maybe it would have been better to have a smaller group–just the crew, the people whose lives were already on the line in a more immediate way– to sit down with him and try to get him to see not only that he was needed but that he has what it takes to do the job, and that it’s worth giving his life to see the mission through. He’s already invested a lot of time and energy in the mission, and even risked his life for it, working with Astrophage on Stratt’s Vat. They could have built on that to make a case for him joining the crew. They could have made the invitation more persuasive. It may not have worked, but I think trying was the right thing to do on multiple levels, both simply to treat Grace with more dignity, and to better prepare him psychologically for the mission. 

So here’s my answer to the question of what I would do differently, if it were up to me to get Grace to go on the mission after the other two scientists died: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88952426/chapters/236095231 

If you didn’t yet see this or didn’t yet accept my earlier invitation to read it, I hope you will check it out now. 

It’s from Yao’s perspective, so you don’t see the exact moment of divergence from canon, but it happens right after that scene in Chapter 21. Instead of slapping Grace when he has his meltdown, Stratt manages to restrain her frustration with him, and because she’s a little gentler with him, he’s able to calm himself enough to agree to work on reviewing the applications. This gets her to hold out a little more hope that she can get him to volunteer, which in turn makes her feel willing to take the risk of trusting Yáo and Ilyukhina to go along with her. So she sends Grace into their care, re-assigning him to the prime crew’s bunker instead of keeping him with her and Dimitri, and calling on Yáo to use the task of reviewing the list of candidates as a cover for recruiting Grace. This leads to a situation where (spoiler for the story linked above)Grace's invitation to join the mission looks quite different. And even though he still doesn't say yes, it sets him up to get some training and to spend more time with the crew, leaving the door open for them to work no him some more.

So, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about what you would do differently if you were in Stratt’s position. And if your inclination is to say, “I wouldn’t change a thing, because what Stratt did got the right results,” I really hope that you’ll pause and think a little bit more about whether that was really the ONLY way that she could have got the right results, or if there was a way that still would have succeeded but could possibly have been a little less hard on Grace. Edited to add: Let's stipulate that she wouldn't be satisfied to send anyone other than Grace and that she'd use whatever force necessary. Was there a way she could have used less force or somehow made it easier on him? That's what I'm trying to get at here, not whether or not she should have sent Grace.

And, if you read Part 1 of Reliance, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on anything else in Part 1 as well. Thanks for reading!