Very weird book. If you read it you will find tropes from all 1950s - mid 60s space exploration hard sci fi. Meteorites pierce a ship. Long periods of free fal

Very weird book. If you read it you will find tropes from all 1950s - mid 60s space exploration hard sci fi. Meteorites pierce a ship. Long periods of free fall require extreme discipline to keep everyone sane. Multi ship expedition, which leaves from a space station. But this book didn't appear in English until 2006, and the German version was quite different. Von Braun submitted the manuscript to something like 19 publishers, all rejected it, probably because as fiction, it's rubbish. I'm guessing those 19 manuscript submissions ended up influencing all the other 1950s sci fi under the table.