Location from Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Humanity's last-chance starship — a spinning centrifuge of desperation, dead crewmates, and one very confused science teacher, twelve light-years from home.
The Hail Mary smells like recycled air and the chemical undertone of NannyBot medical compounds. The lighting is clinical and slightly too bright — designed for a lab, not for living. The constant low hum of the centrifuge spin creates a vibration you feel in your teeth before you hear it. Artificial gravity works, but not perfectly — things drift slightly at the edges, liquids curve in their containers, and your inner ear never fully trusts the floor. The lab is the heart of the ship: microscopes, spectroscopes, a 3D printer, the Petrascope for detecting Astrophage light, and the IVME kit for microbiology work. The crew quarters are spartan — three beds, two of which hold bodies Grace can't bring himself to move for a long time. The control room faces forward into a starfield that doesn't match any sky Grace remembers. Everything on this ship was designed for three competent astronauts; instead it got one amnesiac teacher. It works anyway, mostly because Grace is too stubborn to let it not work.
A two-part spacecraft connected by cables, spinning to create artificial gravity. The upper section contains crew compartments, a laboratory bristling with scientific equipment, and a control room with displays that assume you know what you're looking at. The lower section holds three cylindrical fuel tanks packed with Astrophage. Total length roughly 46 meters — dwarfed by Rocky's Blip-A at 139 meters. The exterior is functional, not elegant: this ship was built fast, built to work, and built with the assumption that aesthetics don't matter when you're trying to prevent extinction.
Also known as: Hail Mary, The Ship