If the checklists, abort criteria, and EVA planning around Natalie York’s Mars geology work—and the nuts-and-bolts Ares hardware—from Baxter’s Voyage grabbed you, you’ll love how The Martian turns survival into pure mission ops. Mark Watney makes water from hydrazine, resurrects Pathfinder to regain comms, and treats every sol like a systems test. It’s that same “what would NASA actually do?” rigor you enjoyed when Ares held together through budget shocks and NERVA debates.

If you were hooked by the Oval Office promises after JFK’s survival, the Senate grilling over the nuclear stage, and Natalie York having to navigate gatekeepers to stay in the astronaut pipeline, The Calculating Stars will feel tailor-made. Elma York battles the International Aerospace Coalition’s politics and congressional oversight after a meteor strike jump-starts the program, fighting for flight assignments and funding with the same high-stakes testimony-and-coalition-building you saw around Ares.

If the stepwise march to Ares—engine tests, crew selection, Mars insertion burns, and tight go/no-go calls—was your favorite part of Voyage, Project Hail Mary delivers that same cadence at full throttle. Ryland Grace breaks the mission into solvable chunks: building instruments on the fly, managing fuel and life support, and forging an unexpected partnership with Rocky to tackle the Astrophage threat. It’s that clear objective, solved through sequential, ingenious fixes.

If the sweep of Voyage—from Apollo’s legacy through the Ares landing—gave you chills, Seveneves widens the horizon from the desperate ISS survival plan after the “Hard Rain” to a far-future return to Earth. You get the nuts-and-bolts (orbital mechanics, propellant budgets, robotic fabrication) plus long-arc consequences, echoing the way Baxter tracks how early policy and design choices ripple into the Mars era.

If you enjoyed how Voyage shifted between Natalie York, Ralph Gershon, and Washington power brokers to show Ares from every angle, Children of Time uses a similarly rich mosaic. You’ll alternate between the starship Gilgamesh’s crew and the terraformed world supervised by Dr. Avrana Kern’s AI—plus the evolving Portiid spiders like Portia—so the stakes of the grand project unfold through contrasting perspectives the way the Ares program did.