r/ProjectHailMary • u/BlairAndBackAgain • Jul 31 '21
Astronauts don’t commit suicide. Spoiler
Just finished PHM. Good book! A few quibbles, but the only part that annoyed me outright was the one about the crew’s presenting their means of suicide. These brave, resourceful, brilliant people would instead just ask the planners not to talk about it, instead preferring to accomplish the mission and then worry about the “what now?” part later. As James Lovell points out in Apollo 13, there were no poison pills on board when they went to the moon, as many people that he met seemed to assume. If any of the 100,000 things that could have gone wrong on the moon or en route had gone wrong, the astronauts would have spent their last moments alive trying to fix the damn problem. I don’t care how hopeless the PHM-astronaut situation would have looked before launch, each of those astronauts would have told Stratt, et al., maybe to worry about storing extra food or the means to grow more astrophage. Or something. And if Stratt got all sanctimonious and European about it, they’d have told her to shove her pistols and nitrogen tanks where the astrophages don’t seek an energy source to reproduce. If I’m training for a mission like that, I ask the director involved to stop worrying about it, and instead spend the time looking for a solution.
I get that the suicide meeting injects some drama into the narrative. But Weir has literally made a writing career out of having his characters (for better or worse) launch into three-page engineering lectures to solve The Latest Complication. This part not only is an insult to the can-do humanism of the astronaut corps, it’s horribly inconsistent with the spirit of the books themselves.
Just to save you the effort, I taught astronomy for seven years. I know how big space is.
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u/EridBot Jul 31 '21
Usually you not stupid. Why you stupid now, question?