What year does Ad Astra take place? While the beginning of the movie merely states it’s “the near future” there are some clues which date it precisely.

The first clue is the date displayed on McBride’s screen: it is Thursday the 3rd.

After his briefing and being told he will be sent to the Moon and then onto Mars, we get a scene where McBride is boarding the rocket to the Moon and we see the Virgin Atlantic departure screen. The date is now 29 May. This clues us into the fact that calendar displayed before was May.

But in between these scenes we see McBride walking down a hallway lined with the CVs of famous astronauts.

The camera zooms in and shows us the CV of McBride’s father, and here, we get a birth date.

If we zoom in, we see a birthday of September 15 (Tommy Lee Jones’ actual birthday) and a year that looks like 2032. (However, the descender on the 5 makes me also question whether the second descender is also a 5, but it looks this typeface uses descenders for the 5s and the 3s).

Ad Astra was filmed in between Aug and October 2017, during the time when Tommy Lee Jones turned 71.

2032+71 = 2103

If we check May 2103 we see that it begins on Tuesday, just like the calendar we saw at the beginning.