National Security Agency

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a United States intelligence organization whose supercomputing and engineering resources were commandeered by Eva Stratt to solve the interstellar dimension of the Astrophage crisis. While Stratt had already assembled an international team of scientists and secured the cooperation of militaries and governments worldwide, the NSA provided the computational firepower needed to analyze decades of amateur astronomical data and model how Astrophage spreads from star to star. This analysis was foundational to the Hail Mary mission: it proved that Earth's sun was not uniquely afflicted, that the infection followed a predictable pattern across local stellar neighbors, and that Tau Ceti—a star at the center of the infected cluster—remained mysteriously untouched, making it the only logical destination for an interstellar rescue mission.

Role in the Astrophage Propagation Model

Stratt explained to Ryland Grace that the NSA had back-calculated the infection's history using luminosity readings normalized across thousands of amateur-generated data sets, corrected for known weather and visibility conditions. The supercomputers ran countless scenarios and propagation models for how Astrophage could travel through the galaxy. The resulting analysis showed that local stars had been dimming for decades, with the rate of dimming increasing exponentially—exactly as observed with the sun. The NSA's models revealed a clear pattern of "infection" from star to star, tracing the contamination back through a chain: Earth's sun was infected by WISE 0855–0714, which was infected by Sirius, which was infected by Epsilon Eridani, beyond which the trail went cold. Crucially, the models determined that Astrophage has a maximum range of just under eight light-years—any star within that distance of an infected star will eventually be infected, because the organisms can only survive so long without a stellar energy source and can coast about eight light-years in that time.

Identification of Tau Ceti as the Mission Target

The NSA's propagation models made one startling discovery that defined the entire Hail Mary project: Tau Ceti, a star near the center of the infected cluster and well within eight light-years of two heavily infected stars, remained completely unaffected. Every star around it was infected, yet Tau Ceti showed no dimming at all. This anomaly—a star that should have been infected but was not—became the mission's central question. Stratt presented this finding to Grace aboard the Chinese aircraft carrier, explaining that the NSA's work had identified Tau Ceti as the only star in the local cluster that was immune to Astrophage, and that understanding why would be the key to saving Earth. The Hail Mary was built specifically to travel to Tau Ceti and discover the reason for its immunity.

Institutional Context and Authority

The NSA's involvement exemplified the extraordinary authority Stratt wielded during the crisis. She did not request the NSA's assistance through normal interagency channels; she simply needed their supercomputers and engineers to try all kinds of scenarios and propagation models, and they complied without question. This was consistent with the broader pattern of Stratt's power: she could command the U.S. Army, redirect Russian Soyuz landings to Saskatchewan, and have the Chinese Navy lend her an aircraft carrier. The NSA, like every other organization Stratt touched, operated under the single-minded imperative that the sun was dying and there was no time for bureaucratic delays. The agency's computational resources were thus deployed not for traditional intelligence purposes but for the unprecedented task of modeling an interstellar biological catastrophe.