This time in Project Hail Mary, which dropped its first trailer this week and its clear he’ll be going a little further than the moon on this mission. 

Based on the 2021 novel by The Martian author Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary follows Dr. Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist who prefers the chaotic fulfillment of teaching middle school science over stuffy, cutthroat higher academia. But as all hero stories go, he’s the guy tasked with saving the world from a new ice age. Our sun is dying, and so are many others throughout the universe. Gosling previously portrayed Neil Armstrong in Damien Chazelle's biopic First Man.

When reluctant astronaut Ryland wakes up from a coma aboard an interstellar spacecraft, he has no idea where he is or why he’s light-years from home. He’s also the only survivor on board. As his memories return, he learns of the Project Hail Mary mission to the Tau Ceti system — located 12 light years (about 72 trillion miles) from Earth — to investigate a strange substance that’s slowly consuming our sun’s energy. Tau Ceti is the one star not infected by the substance, and Ryland has to figure out why in time to save Earth.

Throughout the story, Ryland uses his scientific prowess to deduce facets of the mission and a way forward. He also meets an alien, and a heartwarming friendship develops as the two beings learn about each other and develop a clunky communication system. 

It’s this first contact plot point that has some book fans in a tizzy, arguing the trailer gives away too much about the extraterrestrial being Ryland meets. The protagonist encountering an alien isn’t exactly a major spoiler for the story; the novel’s synopsis teases that he may not have to save his world alone. The encounter happens about a third into the book, so it’s not surprising that the trailer would show it.

Project Hail Mary was announced last spring for a possible 2026 release. This week, Amazon MGM Studios gave it a release date of March 20th, 2026, along with the first trailer and poster. Oscar-winning filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Spider-Verse franchise) direct the movie with screenwriter Drew Goddard, the writer behind Cloverfield (2008), World War Z (2013), and the adaptation of Weir’s The Martian (2015).

Project Hail Mary is Weir’s newest novel and leans more toward science fiction than The Martian. It has classic sci-fi tropes like lightspeed travel, extraterrestrial organic life, and a sixth-grade science teacher who is incredibly intelligent and quick-witted even beyond his molecular biology expertise. Like in The Martian, Project Hail Mary’s prose is super science-y but surprisingly accessible and, dare we say, cool. Weir has a knack for creating popular sci-fi stories that grow beyond the genre to become modern literary classics. 

Weir’s sophomore novel, Artemis, is a sci-fi thriller that follows a young smuggler in the late 2080s on Artemis, the first city on the Moon. In 2017, a film adaptation of the novel was announced with Lord and Miller as co-directors, though no further updates have been revealed since the studio — formerly 20th Century Fox — was purchased by Walt Disney Studios in 2019. 

The Martian film adaptation pushed Weir to stardom outside the book community, pleasing scientists, science nerds, and average sci-fi lovers. A child of a physicist and an electrical engineer, Weir focused on telling a The Martian’s story as scientifically accurate as possible. Before becoming a novelist, Weir was a computer programmer and published serialized fiction on his website. Before The Martian become a New York Times Bestseller, multi-award winner, and adapted into an Oscar-nominated film, the story was shared for free on his website before being picked up by Crown Publishing. 

There’s no Starfleet or space wizards in a faraway galaxy, but historic institutions like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. Producers of the 2015 film got help from JPL in the form of technical documents, photos, and research to accurately portray spacecraft and possible future stations on Mars.

NASA folks, scientists, engineers, and space nerds around the world quickly hopped on the popularity of The Martian. Days after its release, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shared images of locales on Mars seen in the movie, including spots where the fictional Ares 3 landed and worked, and their proximity to the Pathfinder spacecraft and Sojourner rover. JPL also wrote of the important role it plays in the Mars and rescue missions portrayed in the film. Weir, the filmmakers, and some of the stars of the movie even flew to JPL to show off parts of the unfinished film and tour the facilities and the Mars Yard — a training ground for rovers.

The internet also exploded with mainstream and indie publications capitalizing on Martian’s popularity. Outlets and blogs picked apart the science of the novel and movie, fact-checking travel times to the red planet, the realities of landing a spacecraft in its thin atmosphere, the unfeasibility of a spacious spacecraft with large windows, the viability of potatoes, and the nature of Martian dust storms. Whether or not all of the things astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon in the film) and the rest of the crew experience on Mars is completely scientifically accurate is irrelevant to what the movie sparked in the people who watched it — a genuine interest in space, science, and the probability of going to Mars.

The Martian went on to earn Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects. The film also won two Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy and Best Actor — Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Matt Damon’s portrayal of the stranded astronaut.

Project Hail Mary will likely garner a similar response in the public and awards scene, though lightspeed travel beyond our solar system is a much more far-flung (pun intended) possibility than reaching one of our planetary neighbors. NASA and other real-world space science institutions don’t play as prominently in Ryland’s story, which features just as much international science politics as it does technical details about his outer space adventure and heartwarming friendship with an alien. 

Still, get ready for more articles about the science of lightspeed travel and prolonged comas, the probability of sun-eating organic life, and the plausibility of learning to communicate with alien life. While we wait for the movie to drop, here are some facts about the Tau Ceti system:

— Distance from Earth: About 12 light-years

— Type of star: G-type star (our sun is a G-type, yellow-dwarf main sequence star). As the second brightest sun-like star in our sky, it’s visible unaided from Earth. 

— Number of planets: Four confirmed, possibly five exoplanets, including two that could be in the habitable zone in orbit around the star. These two potential super-Earths are designated Tau Ceti e and f and are located in the inner and outer edges of the system’s habitable zone.

— Properties: Compared to our sun, Tau Ceti is slightly smaller, has a slower rotation, and weaker magnetic activity. It has a debris disk, like our system’s Kuiper Belt, filled with dust and debris.

— Appearances in popular culture: Star Trek, Barbarella, Doctor Who, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, and many more.