How Much Would It Cost To Build The Ship From Project Hail Mary?

"Project Hail Mary" has become a straight-up pop culture phenomenon. Andy Weir's novel had already become a hit, but the recent movie, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller ("The LEGO Movie"), starring Ryan Gosling ("Barbie"), has been a downright sensation. It all hinges on the ship at the center of the story, appropriately dubbed the Hail Mary. But is the ship remotely realistic from a dollars-and-cents perspective? Probably not, as it would cost an unfathomable fortune to build in real life.

The story centers on a science teacher named Ryland Grace (Gosling) who wakes up on a spaceship light-years from home with much of his memory missing. As it slowly returns, he discovers he must solve the riddle of a mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. "Project Hail Mary" is pretty scientifically accurate, at least for a blockbuster sci-fi movie like this. That brings us back to the ship.

While it's impossible to calculate the cost of a fictional ship like this in real-world dollars, Weir did provide a passage in his novel that offers some clues as to just what kind of money we're talking about here:

"The Hail Mary was complete. Over 2 million kilograms of spacecraft and fuel in a nice, stable orbit- four times the mass of the International Space Station, and put together in one-twentieth the time. The press used to keep track of the total cost, but around the $10 trillion mark, they gave up. It just didn't matter. It wasn't about efficient use of resources anymore. It was Earth versus Astrophage, and no price was too high."

Hail Mary sounds only slightly more reasonable than the cost to build and operate a Death Star from "Star Wars," that's an eye-popping price tag.

It's exceedingly difficult for the average person to truly, actually comprehend just how much money $1 billion is, let alone $1 trillion. Then let's go ahead and multiply that number by 10. The Hail Mary cost more than that, per Andy Weir. Not that he ran the actual calculations or anything, but he was getting at the idea that the cost would be astronomical. Any "real" number would likely be just as outlandish.

"Project Hail Mary" screenwriter Drew Goddard said the movie was a nightmare to adapt. The cost of the ship was never brought up in the movie, and that's just one example of many, many details that Goddard had to decide whether to include or omit from the cinematic version. Be that as it may, this detail in the book is about as close to an answer as we're likely to get. More to the point, at some point, the actual dollar figure doesn't even matter.

As the key passage from the book explains, the Hail Mary was built to literally save humanity. Astrophage is slowly killing the Earth's sun. Without this mission, humans would be doomed. The sheer cost associated with it makes the shocking twist in Ryan Gosling's "Project Hail Mary" all the more surprising.

Only two countries, the U.S. and China, have a total gross domestic product (GDP) that exceeds $10 trillion (per World Population Review). It's that much money. While we won't spoil the story's twist for those who haven't seen the movie, let's just say those many trillions of dollars aren't exactly in the most surefire hands at the end of the day.

The recently-launched spacecraft Artemis II was a big deal, as it was the first crewed lunar flight in more than five decades. It didn't come cheap either, running at least $4 billion (per Bloomberg). And that's just the cost of this specific mission, not the entire Artemis program. NASA's entire annual budget? Just north of $24 billion since 2024 (per The Planetary Society).

The startling stat confirming Netflix is the king of Hollywood is that its 2024 revenue was $37.5 billion, while the entire global box office was $30 billion that year. But those are numbers that movie lovers might be able to wrap their heads around. To put it another way, you would need to multiply the entirety of the 2024 global box office more than 333 times to equal roughly the cost of the Hail Mary before journalists stopped counting.

When looking at the numbers, it seems entirely unrealistic that such a thing could ever happen, even setting aside the science of it all. However, as the passage from the book notes, "no price was too high." From a global perspective, money begins to look very different when we're talking about the fate of humanity. The world could come together and find $10 trillion if needed, assuming there were no other choices. If it's "make a spaceship or slowly die," it'd probably be amazing how quickly the money could come together.

It's not like other sci-fi where one has to wonder whether "Jurassic Park" would have been a viable business or not. Within the universe, this was do-or-die. $10 trillion is a bargain to save humanity, in the abstract anyway.

"Project Hail Mary" is in theaters now.